Shafaq News- Baghdad

Iraq will not ban Waze, as doing so would mean breaking with its owner, Google, the head of the country's telecommunications and media regulator said on Friday.

Speaking at the 2026 Internet Governance Forum in Baghdad, Baligh Abu Kalal, head of the Executive Body of the Communications and Media Commission (CMC), acknowledged that Israeli programmers built the navigation app before Google acquired it. "Iraq deals with Google, and banning part of the company's applications because the founders of some programs are from the Zionist entity is out of the question," he said.

He added that Iraq uses Google's services freely and that other apps likely have Israeli programmers behind them too, leaving Iraq to either accept the company's policy or not.

Abu Kalal backed the Communications Ministry's push for Iraqi developers to build local alternatives, although he said doing so "is not easy."

Communications Minister Mustafa Sanad said on Thursday that he had not backed down from banning Waze, a month after he announced plans to block the app at the start of 2027 over its Israeli origins.

Iraq has no diplomatic relations with Israel, and a 2022 law criminalizes any political, economic, or cultural ties with it.