Kurdish forest police fight against illegal charcoal hampered by party rivalry

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — In need of nourishment, thousands of customers, from construction workers to diplomats, queue up every day at teahouses, restaurants and food stalls across the Kurdistan Region. They wait for their favourite food and drink – kebab, masgouf, tea – to be prepared on a charcoal fire.

To make charcoal, you need to cut down trees. To make enough charcoal for the Kurdistan Region’s hospitality sector, tens of thousands of trees, some a hundred years old, are cut down and burned region-wide every month – some legally, some not. Illegal logging and charcoal production happen in broad daylight, because both influential officials and rival Kurdish ruling parties are making it harder for those charged with protecting the forest and environment from doing their jobs, coal production plant owners and officials have told Rudaw. 

Until recently, the Malakan Valley, near Khalifan, Erbil province, was home to at least 40 illegal charcoal production plants that turned hundreds of trees into a fuel we prize, its production causing untold damage to the environment.

“We have tried to stop new charcoal plants,“ Maghdid Ahmad, the mayor of Khalifan, told Rudaw’s Bakhtyar Qadir on Sunday. “When it comes to the old ones, we are able most of the time to prevent them from operating; however, we have also faced obstacles to stop them.”

Fighting back against illegal charcoal production are the underpaid, under-resourced Environment and Forest Police. In the provinces of Erbil and Sulaimani, they regularly detain people involved in illegal charcoal production, according to the updates on their Facebook pages; the forest police in Khalifan say they have detained 20 people in the last year, handing them over to the courts and seizing their illegal produce.

The forest police are already under extreme pressure, having to put out fires caused by Turkish and Iranian bombardments in the Kurdistan Region’s border area. To make matters worse for them, the myriad of security forces under the command of the two main ruling parties are preventing the environment and forest police from doing their jobs. And with high demand for charcoal from the Kurdish public, the police are struggling to cope with the resistance enacted by hunters, loggers and plant owners, who, to protect their trade, are unafraid to fire at forest police officers, killing at least one and wounding dozens of others. Most recently, Major Karzan from the Sangaw area in Garmiyan was shot at and injured by illegal hunters in January.

“There are times when they fire at us,” Abubakir Omar, a forest police officer stationed in Khalifan told Rudaw on Sunday. 

“We don’t have what we need to do our jobs,” Omar said. “We have done the best with what we have.”

Forest police are “constantly under fire” while on duty, causing injuries and even deaths, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) General Directorate of Forests and Grasslands.

“Yes, we have been fired upon and we even sustained injuries, and we’ve lost martyrs,” Captain Fouad Ahmad, the directorate’s spokesperson told Rudaw’s Shahyan Tahseen on her daily Berpirsyar programme on Monday.

“We are constantly under fire, we sustain injuries all the time – from charcoal production plant owners, hunters, loggers, fishermen, all of them fire at us.”

Captain Ahmad said that at least one forest police officer had been fatally shot.

“Are you telling me that there are people in Kurdistan that are prepared to kill a forest police officer in order to illegally hunt or log?” Tahseen asked Captain Ahmad. 

“Yes," he said. "They are prepared to fire at you because you go and disrupt their operation, even though they are destroying the environment.”

The story of illegal logging in the Malakan Valley is complicated by its borderland location. Though the valley is in Erbil province, most of which is controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), it is far east enough that it falls under the control of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) security forces. Khalifan’s Environment and Forest Police, under the command of the KDP, says it wants to stop illegal loggers and charcoal production plant owners from operating in the valley, but are stopped from doing so. 

The KDP and PUK’s zones of control were marked out in 1996, in the middle of a civil war between the two parties. The KDP area was commonly known as the Yellow Zone, the PUK area as the Green Zone. The two parties unified their administrations in 2006, and have made significant progress in many fields since, disputes between the two parties over who controls what territory continue to this day.

Both Captain Ahmad and mayor Maghdid Ahmad agree that the KDP-PUK rivalry is making their job harder, at the expense of the environment.

When pressed about the issue, Captain Ahmad, the spokesperson for a directorate of what is supposed to be a multi-party KRG, said that the issue is a rivalry between the “Yellow and Green regions”. 

Tahseen asked the captain if he was referring to the KDP-PUK rivalry, to which he said: “You know what I mean; you know the reality of Kurdistan. Sometimes you make a decision, but you can’t enforce it.” 

One of the main problems is the influence of officials in the area, who can release a load of illegal trees or charcoal seized by the environment police with just a phone call according to Ahmed, who believes it should be judges clued up on environmental law who preside over such cases.

Another problem facing the forest and environment police is the leniency shown by the courts, with loggers and charcoal production plant owners sometimes released without charge or given a small fine. 

“We do our work, but what happens in court is outside my powers,” Captain Ahmad said.

The severity of punishment for chopping down trees depends on the age of the tree. For a tree over the age of 20, the logger has to pay 460,000 dinars and plant at least another three – but these rules are not observed, and not a single person has been forced to pay the full amount, according to officials who spoke to Tahseen.

Illegal logging to produce charcoal and other products is a problem not just in and around Khalifan, but across the Kurdistan Region.

“The trees in Barzinja are facing threats… as a result of two operations from the forest and environment to the village of Gelara, one resident was detained for illegal logging and seized 19 oak trees, and in the second operation two dunams of forest land [were seized] but the perpetrator was not identified,” read a post on the official Facebook page of the forest and environment police of Sulaimani province.

Despite the difficulties they face,  the forestry police are, slowly but surely, bringing down loggers and the owners of illegal plants.

“Too many trees are cut every year, but honestly, the situation is getting better and better. Of 40 charcoal production plants, there are 19 left, and some [of the 19] cases are in court,” Captain Ahmad told Rudaw on Monday. 

“The day before yesterday, we detained someone transporting a load of charcoal at the Gali Ali Beg checkpoint [near Khalifan] and sent him to court… we do everything in our power to halt this trade.”