ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - At least 18 people have been arrested over the past month for illegally cutting down trees in forests in the Kurdistan Region's Erbil and Sulaimani provinces, authorities and local officials told Rudaw on Tuesday, warning that offenders could face fines and possible prison sentences.
“We have arrested 14 people across the four sub-districts of the Balakayati area in the Soran Independent Administration [northeast of Erbil] for cutting down trees,” Ahmed Barzan Aliko, commissioner of Choman district in Soran, told Rudaw’s Astera Ghazi, adding that “all the tools and equipment used for logging have been confiscated.”
He said the offenders had tried to justify their actions by citing a “lack of fuel for heating in the winter season” or the need to clear their orchards, lamenting that “trees up to 50 years old had been cut down.”
Aliko stressed that “forest rangers and environmental police patrols are constantly on duty monitoring the area, and wherever trees are being felled, suspects are immediately arrested and handed over to the court to be punished in accordance with environmental protection laws.”
Meanwhile, in the Kurdistan Region’s eastern Sulaimani province “four individuals were arrested on charges of cutting down natural trees, having cut down 186 oak trees,” the province’s Forest and Environment Police Directorate said in a statement on Tuesday.
Staff Brigadier Hemin Kamarkhan on the same day told Rudaw’s Soran Hussein that the trees cut were “between 15 and 30 years old,” elaborating that the judiciary would determine the penalties for the corresponding offenses based on the age and type of the tree, and even the equipment used to cut them.
“These penalties can include financial fines as well as imprisonment,” he said.
The latest arrests highlight the continued enforcement against illegal logging, which authorities say threatens natural forests and older trees across the Kurdistan Region.
Under Article 21 of the Region's Forestry and Rangelands Law, cutting trees is punishable by a fine of between three to five million dinars ($2,300 to $3,800), and in some cases by imprisonment of up to one year.
At the federal level, Iraq's Law for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment (No. 27 of 2009) strictly prohibits cutting down forest trees, or trees in public places, without official permission. Depending on the scale of the violation, penalties include fines and imprisonment.
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