In a dispatch posted at 6:55pm Baghdad time Saturday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that 55 "Israeli" companies were now working in Iraq under assumed names.

Yaqen reported that the Zionist firms operate in a variety of fields, including infrastructure and marketing. The Zionist Mossad secret police agency had established the Kurdish Lending Bank with its headquarters in as-Sulaymaniyah in the US-founded Kurdish separatist enclave in northern Iraq.

The report indicated that the Kurdish Lending Bank had a secret mission of purchasing vast tracts of agricultural land, oil fields, and residential areas in the vicinity of the cities of al-Mawsil and Kirkuk, both oil-rich cities in northern Iraq. The massive land purchases facilitate the effort by the US-backed Kurdish separatist Peshmergah militia to expel Arab and Turkoman residents of northern Iraq so that the oil-rich area can be annexed to the Kurdish separatist state under US and Zionist hegemony.

Meanwhile the Zionist state exports more than $300 million in goods to Iraq annually. In addition Zionist companies obtain contracts for construction projects in Iraq, thanks to help from USAID, the American agency that oversees the allocation of building contracts in Iraq.

The report indicated that one of the chief beneficiaries of the Zionist presence in Iraq has been former "Israeli" Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak who also formerly served as "Israeli" Minister of Communications.

Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.