A few years ago, when Iraqi prime minister Nuri Al Maliki was still in office, a group of his closest aides traveled to Amman, Jordan, and rented suites in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. They were there for meetings with foreign businessmen who had flown in to seek a lucrative contract for an energy-related project—one that would help rebuild Iraq’s battered infrastructure. Baghdad, like much of Iraq, remained in a state of chaos, and was thus too dangerous for visitors. Amman also offered greater discretion than the Iraqi capital, which was an essential condition for the meetings: The businessmen had come to offer bribes to Maliki and other senior government officials in return for the contract.

The meetings were presided over by Gata Njeiman Al Rikabi, the prime minister’s chief of protocol. Rikabi and Maliki had a reputation for corruption and ruthlessness. Munir Haddad, head of the special court that handed down Saddam Hussein’s death sentence, filed a complaint in 2014 charging that the two officials had threatened to kill him if he didn’t halt an investigation into their alleged use of the security services to murder political and business opponents. Days after filing, Haddad was the target of a failed assassination attempt; the investigation has not proceeded.

According to one of the businessmen who attended the meetings in Amman, Rikabi’s terms were simple: Whoever won the contract would hand over a 45 percent stake in the deal—plus a hefty payment in advance—to an Iraqi firm controlled by officials close to Maliki. The Iraqi firm would, in turn, use the payment to make kickbacks to various senior politicians—mostly Shias from Maliki’s ruling Dawa Party, but also a few Kurdish officials who needed to give their approval before an energy project could be built in their territory.

“The Shias who ran the company didn’t know anything about the project—they were just eager beavers who wanted to get rich,” the businessman says. “It had nothing to do with technical ability or expertise: Rikabi was just distributing money. As an investor, you might not see any profit for five or six years, if ever. But the politicians had to be paid up front.”

None of the businessmen at the meeting were surprised by the openness or extent of the corruption. Foreign firms bidding to help rebuild Iraq were often ordered to take on Iraqi officials as partners—sometimes multiple subcontractors—in order to secure a deal. U.S. tax dollars sent to arm Iraqi soldiers in the fight against Al Qaeda would frequently vanish into Swiss bank accounts. The weapons would never materialize—or worse, they would end up in the hands of America’s enemies. Graft and fraud were so widespread, in fact, that they helped pave the way for an entirely new threat: The firm that won the energy contract in Amman was unable to complete the project, because the territory where it was located was soon overrun by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS.