Baghdad’s own website says fuel subsidies for all sectors end on 1 September

The Prime Minister’s Office website, pmo.iq, carries the outcome of the 15th regular Council of Ministers session, including approval of a recommendation to purchase crude at either the SOMO price or the price fixed in the general budget, whichever is lower, at a 30 percent discount, to be set annually and beginning 1 September 2026, with proceeds paid to the public treasury and the fiscal effects to be reviewed in detail. The same page records the adoption of a study on lifting subsidies on petroleum product prices for all sectors from 1 September 2026, excluding products supplied to citizens — petrol, gas oil, kerosene and LPG — on the reasoning that any subsidy granted to any sector reduces the treasury’s share. The proposed mechanism goes to the Federal Board of Supreme Audit. This is the government’s own primary posting, read off the front page rather than from the session minutes; the session date and the Arabic wording of the household exclusion both need checking before anyone quotes them as final.

The cabinet carrying this out is incomplete. Ali Falih al-Zaidi, a businessman with no previous office, was named prime minister-designate by President Nizar Amedi on 27 April 2026 after nomination by the Coordination Framework, and parliament gave him a vote of confidence on 14 May while approving 14 of 23 ministers, according to FDD’s Long War Journal and the International Crisis Group. Defence, interior, planning, higher education, reconstruction and housing, and culture were left unfilled. That was 107 days ago. The most recent indication of progress in the material available to this desk is a single aggregated report by the Egyptian outlet Youm7, dated 11 August, that Zaidi told a Coordination Framework meeting the line-up was close to complete; it was not independently confirmed. The Washington Times, a US conservative outlet, marked his first hundred days on 20 August in an opinion column characterising the record as largely declaratory.

Assessment: Disclosure first: the desk’s sweep for 27–29 August failed at the tool level, and nothing here is dated inside the window. What survives is a calendar, and the calendar is the story. Fuel pricing is the one file in Iraq where an administrative decision reliably meets the street, and it lands on a government with no interior minister and an acting-or-caretaker security portfolio through most of 2026. Two things to watch and not to assume: whether the household exclusion holds in the Arabic text, and whether the Board of Supreme Audit sign-off has actually happened or is being cited as cover for a decision already taken.