Shafaq News

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Falih al-Zaidi will travel to Tehran on Thursday carrying a proposal to host US-Iranian talks in Baghdad, his first regional stop after five days in Washington, and the most exposed test yet of whether Iraq's new government can convert its position between the two adversaries into leverage over them. The initiative arrives with Iranian officials already questioning al-Zaidi's judgment in public.

Iraq is not a neutral capital offering good offices; it is the principal arena in which the US-Iranian confrontation is fought. Iranian-aligned armed factions operate on its territory, US forces are scheduled to complete their withdrawal at the end of September, and al-Zaidi has staked his premiership on a pledge that no weapons will remain outside state control after that date. A mediation that succeeds would reframe Iraq as a platform for dialogue rather than a theater for it.

Government spokesperson Haidar al-Aboudi framed the trip as a response to demand rather than an application for a role, telling the official news agency that regional and international actors have shown interest in what Baghdad can contribute given its balanced relations and its capacity to support dialogue and reduce tensions. He paired that with a defensive note: the file of confining weapons to the state is managed by independent national decision.

Read more: PM Al-Zaidi heads to Tehran with US-Iran dialogue proposal

Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein has been more precise about the limits, saying Baghdad carries no American message to Iran but can convey what it heard in Washington alongside its own position, and that any discussion of political or economic initiatives requires de-escalation first.

Iraq's credentials as an intermediary are real but narrower than they appear. Beginning in 2021, Baghdad hosted successive rounds of confidential Saudi-Iranian contacts at a time when the two states had no diplomatic relations, and while the final agreement was announced in Beijing in 2023, the groundwork is widely credited to those meetings.

The precedent is genuine. It is also structurally different: Riyadh and Tehran both wanted a settlement and needed a discreet venue. Washington and Tehran, in contrast, are contesting the terms of Iran's nuclear program, its regional posture, sanctions relief, and military deployments, with an unfinished war behind them.

Baghdad has tried this before, and recently. Under former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, whose government preceded al-Zaidi's, Iraq spent the closing months of 2025 attempting to arrange a bilateral US-Iranian meeting in Baghdad. Al-Sudani said in December that American officials had accepted the principle of talks in the Iraqi capital, and described raising the idea directly with US envoy Tom Barrack. Those efforts produced no meeting. The obstacle he identified was that Iran required assurances an agreement would not be followed within hours by an attack, and this has not been removed.

Iranian affairs expert Mahdi Azizi reads the Foreign Ministry's language as evidence that something was agreed in Washington. US President Donald Trump, he told Shafaq News, handed al-Zaidi this card to play. “Baghdad understands the Iranian interior and the Iranian mood while remaining present in the Arab environment, a combination unavailable to Qatar, Oman, or Pakistan.”

Political researcher Nawal al-Mousawi accepts the channels exist and locates the difficulty elsewhere. The problem, she told Shafaq News, is not Iraq's ability to communicate but its domestic condition, “above all the question of Iranian influence inside the country,” which is precisely the file Washington cares most about.

“A mediator whose internal balance is itself the subject of negotiation cannot easily stand outside the dispute,” Al-Mousawi argued, but saw room for the prime minister to run private conversations with both sides toward more flexible positions, and reports indications that unannounced understandings may be within reach.

Writer and researcher Salih al-Qazwini dismisses the framing entirely. The identity of the mediator, he told Shafaq News, is not the variable that matters; the failure lies with the American side and its non-compliance with what has been agreed. Any future mediation, on his account, must produce enforcement mechanisms and guarantees rather than a political understanding on paper.

Haitham Numaan, professor of political science at Britain's University of Exeter, described al-Zaidi’s mediator role between Trump and Iran as overstating the case. Tehran and Washington maintain direct and indirect channels, as recent contacts in Pakistan and Oman demonstrated; a third party is not required to open one.

The realistic function, al-Heeti told Shafaq News, is narrower and less flattering: “conveying American demands concerning Iraq itself, reducing Iranian influence, opening the country to US investment.”

Al-Zaidi, in his phrasing, may be a representative of American requirements in Iraq, presenting terms that break with the earlier arrangement in which the country served as a space of equilibrium between the two powers. Al-Heeti warns that Tehran is unlikely to absorb that shift quietly and may activate its instruments inside Iraq against steps it reads as threatening.

Iran's public conduct over the past week supports the darker reading. Ali Akbar Velayati, adviser to the supreme leader, called al-Zaidi inexperienced, described the Washington trip as ill-timed given that it followed within days the funeral proceedings for Ali Khamenei —killed in the opening phase of the US-Israeli war on Iran— and characterized the visit as a blow to Iraqi dignity. Tehran then moved to contain the damage, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi telling Fuad Hussein that bilateral ties should not be affected by personal and unofficial remarks. Sources familiar with the funeral arrangements say friction had already developed after al-Zaidi declined an official state ceremony in Baghdad, confining the proceedings to Najaf and Karbala.

Al-Zaidi's own position compounds the difficulty. A 40-year-old businessman with no prior experience in government, he emerged in May as a compromise after Trump's rejection of Nouri al-Maliki's candidacy deadlocked the Coordination Framework, the ruling Shiite alliance, for months.

The question Iranian officials will be weighing is whether a prime minister who owes his office partly to an American veto, and who has promised to disarm Tehran's Iraqi partners by September 30, is offering them a table or presenting them with a bill.

Read more: Iraq's September 30 weapons deadline leaves terms of disarmament unresolved

Written and edited by Shafaq News Agency