Shafaq News
Iraq has around 340 licensed political parties, but real power rests with 10 to 15 parties and coalitions, and more than half of those are tied, directly or indirectly, to armed factions or security formations with political loyalties. The overlap blurs the constitutional boundary between armed institutions and political activity just as Baghdad moves ahead with efforts to bring faction weapons under state control.
Parties linked to armed groups hold ministries and parliamentary seats and help decide who governs. Iraq's legal framework, meanwhile, prohibits militias outside the armed forces and restricts political parties from maintaining links to armed formations. The challenge for Iraqi lawmakers, and for Washington, which has pressed Baghdad to bring weapons under state control, is whether the state can enforce those rules on political actors that are themselves part of the governing system.
From One Party To Hundreds
Before 2003, Iraq was a one-party state. The Baath Party of Saddam Hussein controlled political life and allowed no real competition. The US-led invasion that toppled Saddam in April 2003 opened the field, and the 2005 constitution established a multiparty system built on the peaceful transfer of power.
The sectarian shape of Iraq's armed politics has roots in the Baath era. Shia Muslims, who make up most of Iraq's population, were largely excluded from power, and their opposition movements were driven underground or into exile. When Shia-led uprisings swept southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, government forces crushed them with large-scale atrocities against civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. Several of today's factions grew out of that opposition.
The Badr Organization began in the early 1980s as the Iran-based armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, then the main exiled Shia opposition party. That history helps explain why Shia factions form the largest and most visible part of Iraq's armed politics. It does not, however, resolve their status under the constitution and the parties’ law, neither of which distinguishes between communities.
Legal expert Faisal Rikan told Shafaq News that the abrupt shift from single-party rule to open pluralism produced a flood of new movements and parties. In the years that followed, it also produced armed wings.
“Some parties kept fighters to protect themselves and spread their ideas,” Rikan said, even though the constitution clearly prohibits militias outside the armed forces.
What the Law Says
Article 9 of the constitution requires the armed forces and security services to reflect Iraq's communities without discrimination, places them under civilian authority, and states that they shall not be used to suppress the Iraqi people, interfere in political affairs, or play any role in the transfer of power. Its second clause states: “The formation of military militias outside the framework of the armed forces is prohibited.” Another provision restricts members of the armed forces from running for political office or campaigning for candidates while preserving their right to vote.
The Political Parties Law No. 36 of 2015 goes further. Article 8(3) stipulates that a party's founding and activity “shall not take the form of military or paramilitary organizations,” and that a party may not be linked “to any armed force.” The law also provides mechanisms for legal action against parties that engage in military or paramilitary activity or use violence in politics.
Rikan said those provisions have not been effectively enforced against the major political forces associated with armed factions.
When the Factions Entered Parliament
Political researcher Muhannad al-Janabi traces the problem to the earliest years after 2003, when armed groups that had opposed Saddam were absorbed into the new order, followed by a period of proliferating factions and militias. Al-Janabi rejects the idea that this is a passing irregularity, calling it “a dilemma in the Iraqi political system.”
He identifies the 2018 elections as the turning point. Factions tied to the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a state-funded umbrella of mostly Shia armed groups formed in 2014 to fight ISIS and later incorporated by law into Iraq's security structure, entered parliament through political fronts while retaining armed formations.
That, al-Janabi told Shafaq News, created a major constitutional and legal problem. The PMF's legal status makes the issue particularly complex: its formations operate within a state-recognized security institution, while political organizations associated with some of those formations compete in elections and hold parliamentary seats.
The November 2025 elections cemented the pattern. Five Shia factions with armed wings now hold roughly 61 seats in the 329-member parliament, nearly a fifth of the chamber. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, led by Qais al-Khazali, sits through its Sadiqoon bloc with 27 seats, and one of its lawmakers, Adnan Fayhan, serves as first deputy speaker. The Badr Organization of Hadi al-Amiri holds 18 seats. Kataib Hezbollah's political wing, Hoqooq, holds six. Kataib Imam Ali, led by Shibl al-Zaydi, sits through its Khadamat bloc with five, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, led by Abu Alaa al-Walai, holds about five through its Montasiroun list, which runs inside former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition.
All five belong to the Coordination Framework, the alliance of Shia parties that has dominated government formation since 2022, and all five field brigades inside the PMF. Their fighters draw state salaries through the PMF, while their political representatives sit in the legislature that sets the institution's budget and legal framework.
The Framework itself is not uniformly armed: the State of Law of Nouri al-Maliki, the al-Hikma Movement of Ammar al-Hakim, and the Reconstruction and Development Coalition of former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani have no armed wings, yet they govern alongside faction-linked political forces.
A further group sits outside the formal political system. Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, led by Akram al-Kaabi, along with Saraya Awliya al-Dam and Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, operate as armed factions with no registered political wing. That places them outside the direct reach of provisions in the parties law governing registered political organizations, leaving their armed status to be addressed through the wider constitutional and security framework.
The result, in al-Janabi's analysis, is a class of political actors that combines parliamentary influence with armed power. He argues that sovereignty can be eroded from within as well as from outside once armed groups can shape official decisions on security and politics.
“How freely can the commander-in-chief of the armed forces decide the fate of formations associated with parties in his own governing coalition?” he questioned.
Beyond One Community
The pattern is not confined to Shia factions. The PMF also absorbed Sunni tribal forces, known as the Tribal Mobilization, along with Christian, Turkmen, Shabak, and Yazidi units. The Babylon Movement, led by Rayan al-Kildani, controls the PMF's 50th Brigade and won four of the five parliamentary seats reserved for Christians in 2021; in the 2025 elections, the group dominated Christian quota seats. Much of its fighting force and voter base comes from Shia communities rather than Christian ones, and the Chaldean Catholic Church has publicly distanced itself from the group.
In the Kurdistan Region (KRI), the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) historically maintained Peshmerga forces organized largely along party lines. The Kurdistan Regional Government has since moved to bring those forces under the unified command of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, formally announcing completion of that process in September 2026. The Peshmerga also differ legally from militias outside the state structure because the Iraqi constitution recognizes the KRI's security forces.
Shia factions nevertheless account for the most significant intersection between faction-linked political representation and the PMF itself, where several Iran-aligned groups have maintained substantial influence.
The Vocabulary of Retreat
Al-Janabi points to a quieter shift in how the issue is discussed. The official Arabic formula, usually translated as “confining weapons to the state,” once implied full disarmament. In his reading, the political conversation has since drifted toward “regulating weapons,” a lower ceiling that leaves the arms in place and changes only who supervises them.
“Iraq needs disarmament, not merely the confinement of weapons,” he said.
The distinction matters because recent pledges fit both readings. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, sworn in on May 14, 2026, made state control of arms a central commitment. After Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr dissolved his Saraya al-Salam armed group and placed it under state control, other factions followed. Asaib Ahl al-Haq said it would leave the PMF and place its weapons under state control, as Kataib Imam Ali had done. If implemented, those moves would end the dual status of both factions' fighters.
Others were less clear. Kataib Hezbollah said it supported handing over weapons to the state but attached conditions, including the complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi territory and airspace, guarantees against their return, an end to “American influence” over the country's political and economic decisions, the withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Iraq, and the dissolution of the Peshmerga.
Those conditions make any immediate disarmament contingent on demands extending well beyond the government's weapons initiative. Al-Nujaba rejected the initiative outright.
Both positions illustrate al-Janabi's point: “handing over” and “disarming” are not the same act.
Economic Reach
Political researcher Abdul Qader al-Nayel argues the problem has moved beyond legal violations into the character of the political system itself. The system, he told Shafaq News, breaches the parties’ law in practice, and two decades of tolerance have produced what he calls “statelets” with military, economic, political, and media power of their own.
He attributes this to weak state institutions and the leverage armed groups hold over political and economic decisions. His prescriptions reach beyond the weapons: closing the “economic offices” run by armed parties, some of which are accused of pressuring merchants, contractors, and business owners; addressing foreign armed groups operating on Iraqi soil; and requiring the Independent High Electoral Commission to bar any party proven to have an armed wing from running for office.
Al-Nayel also proposes a path for the fighters themselves, either reintegration into state institutions or civilian alternatives.
A political source previously told Shafaq News that a government proposal envisaged absorbing around 35,000 faction members into the army, police, and Counter Terrorism Service in exchange for surrendering their weapons. Baghdad also plans to continue its weapons buyback program. The proposed state monopoly bill, as currently drafted, would not affect the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Washington's Timetable
The domestic legal argument now runs alongside external pressure. Al-Zaidi instructed officials in August to draft legislation regulating the possession and use of weapons by state institutions as part of a broader effort to establish a state monopoly over arms.
The timetable has since stretched substantially. What was initially presented as a Sept. 30 deadline has evolved into a staged process that al-Zaidi says should be completed by June 30, 2027.
Meeting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week, al-Zaidi renewed his government's commitment to restricting weapons to state institutions. US officials have also continued to press Baghdad over the role of armed factions and weapons outside direct state control.
What the Law Cannot Yet Reach
Every expert who spoke to Shafaq News located the solution in enforcing laws Iraq already has, not simply writing new ones. Rikan warned that any party whose armed wing remains outside the legal framework could face constitutional and legal accountability.
The difficulty lies in applying those provisions to a political system in which faction-linked parties hold parliamentary seats, senior positions and roles in government formation, while armed factions without political wings sit outside the parties’ law altogether.
Weapons handed to the state can be counted, catalogued, and verified. Determining whether a political party has truly severed its relationship with an armed force is harder, and Iraq's institutions will have to make that determination while some of the parties concerned hold seats within those same institutions.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.