Iraq factions resist disarmament as coalition exit nears
Shafaq News
Iraq's most powerful armed factions say they will give up their weapons only after the country secures full sovereignty, a condition they do not expect to be met by the end of September. Prime Minister Ali Falih al-Zaidi has linked efforts to bring faction weapons under state control to the September 30 end of the US-led Coalition's mission, arguing that the departure of foreign forces would remove one of the factions' principal justifications for remaining armed. Some Iran-aligned groups reject that sequence.
The clearest statement of their terms came from Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, an Iran-aligned faction inside the state-funded Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and a group the United States designated a terrorist organization in 2023. Its spokesman, Kadhim al-Fartousi, told Shafaq News the faction would not disarm while foreign forces and outside threats to Iraqi sovereignty remained, and that its arsenal exists to defend the country rather than to serve any single government. The factions, he said, treat weapons and sovereignty as one bargain.
Washington’s pressure on the question is concrete. The House-passed version of the US National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 (H.R. 8800), which as of September 11, 2026 has not yet been enacted into law, would limit the obligation of certain US security-assistance funds for the Iraqi security forces to no more than 25 percent until the Secretary of Defense certifies that Baghdad has taken credible steps to “reduce the operational capacity of Iran‑aligned militia groups not integrated into the Iraqi security forces” through a publicly verifiable disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process; strengthen the authority and operational control of the Prime Minister of Iraq as Commander‑in‑Chief over the Iraqi security forces; and investigate and hold accountable members of “Iran‑aligned militias or the Iraqi security forces” who operate outside the formal chain of command and engage in attacks on US or Iraqi personnel or otherwise act in an illegal or destabilizing manner.
Alina Romanowski, the former US ambassador to Iraq, told an Atlantic Council panel in Washington that sanctions would remain Washington's main instrument and would tighten until the United States reaches a broader settlement with Iran.
For Baghdad, she said, the working relationship between al-Zaidi and President Donald Trump is the most effective way to soften that pressure and turn it toward economic cooperation. The two met in Washington over the summer.
Al-Zaidi has little margin to absorb any of it. An independent banker with no prior senior office, he took power in May as a compromise candidate of the Coordination Framework —the alliance of Shia political forces that includes the parties tied to the factions he is now asked to confront— after months of deadlock following the 2025 election. At 41, he is the youngest prime minister in Iraq's history.
Fahd al-Jabouri, a leader of the National Wisdom Movement, a Shia party within the Coordination Framework, said disarmament is settled in principle and needs only time. He described a document, expected to be signed in the coming weeks, that would set out a mechanism for the handover, and called it a near-agreement among the government, the factions, and the Framework.
September 30, in his account, opens the process rather than ends it, with the handover running toward the close of the year.
There are talks to point to. A three-member committee formed by the Framework —the former prime ministers Mohammed Shia al-Sudani and Nouri al-Maliki, with Badr Organization leader Hadi al-Amiri— has met the factions in recent weeks over the guarantees they want, among them the coalition's departure and national control of Iraq's air defenses.
Issam al-Faili, a professor of political science at al-Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, reads the legislative track less hopefully. "The long-delayed PMF Service And Retirement Law, which would fix the force's ranks, pay, and command structure in law, is being used to fold the factions into the PMF rather than to dissolve them," a path that would keep their weight inside the state. Some groups are making any reorganization conditional on the law's passage, he added, and the bill remains stuck.
Read more: Iraq's PMF Service and Retirement Law: Is political exploitation inevitable?
That reading fits a proposal reported in August, under which weapons handed over by the factions would be stored at PMF sites rather than passed to the defense or interior ministries or the counter-terrorism service. The PMF still contains the Iran-aligned factions themselves, so the arrangement would put the weapons under a state command in name while leaving them inside the same network. Shiite political figures have described the shift as a move from disarmament toward what they term weapons management.
Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi analyst and fellow at Century International, part of The Century Foundation, made a similar case at the Atlantic Council. The emerging timeline, he said, ends the coalition's mission but not the factions' armament; the groups see no reason to disarm while US sanctions still target their commanders, and no political guarantees are on the table.
He described the government's approach as pressure paired with incentive: sanctions and the threat of force on one side, the promise of foreign investment, particularly in energy, on the other. That investment, he said, is meant to revive an economy he estimates has lost billions of dollars to disrupted oil exports, leaving the state struggling to cover salaries and pensions.
Jiyad put al-Zaidi's real problem at home. Relations with Washington are the warmest in years, he said, carried by the rapport with Trump and by back-channel diplomacy. But the prime minister holds no bloc or party of his own to shield him from the established leaders who have run Iraqi politics for two decades. Should the effort fail, Jiyad suggested, al-Zaidi could weigh resignation rather than let wider sanctions fall on the state —a possibility he raised, not a stated intention.
A thinner US presence brings its own risk, Romanowski added: it narrows Washington's options for a quick military response if the factions escalate, including against the Kurdistan Region, which has taken repeated drone and missile fire.
Haitham Numaan, a professor of political science at the University of Exeter, is more doubtful still. Al-Zaidi's outsider standing gives him some room, he said, but a prime minister produced by the existing order cannot break with it, and the factions are bound too tightly to powerful blocs for him to take them on directly.
What has happened so far, in his view, is a set of political maneuvers meant to convince Washington that change is coming. He warned that Iraq could be pulled into a wider US-Iran confrontation, whatever Baghdad intends.
Read more: Iraq's disarmament deadline pits Baghdad against Iran-aligned factions
That danger stopped being hypothetical while the talks were still underway. Saudi Arabia said several drones launched from Iraq struck its East–West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions, causing casualties and property damage and forcing a precautionary shutdown of a line that carries crude toward the Red Sea coast. Riyadh said it reserved the right to protect its sovereignty, security, and installations.
No faction claimed the attack, a silence that stands out from the openness with which the same groups had set out their terms weeks earlier.
Al-Zaidi's response tracked the demand Washington has been pressing. After authorities concluded the drones had flown from a site inside Maysan, he ordered an investigation into the province's operations command and removed its commander, while security forces opened a large-scale search for those responsible, a campaign the Counter-Terrorism Service could join.
The move asserted his authority as Commander-in-Chief, the same authority the US defense bill would have him strengthen, and it exposed the limit of the arrangement his government has been negotiating: weapons kept inside the state yet still inside the factions' network had, by Riyadh's account, just been fired across a border at a neighbor whose investment Baghdad is counting on to rescue its economy.
September 30 will close the coalition's military mission, the final phase of a drawdown that began when US forces left federal Iraq in 2025. The factions' weapons will still be in the country the next day. Under the arrangements now discussed, they would pass into state-run PMF storage rather than be surrendered, a distinction the government and the factions have yet to settle.
Read more: Tension meets dialogue as Iraq approaches September 30
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
