Ten months after the vote, Iraq still has no confirmed interior or defence minister

Iraq voted in November 2025. President Nizar Amidi, of the PUK, took office on 12 April 2026, a House of Commons Library research briefing (CBP-10829, 8 July 2026) confirms, under the convention that reserves the presidency for a Kurdish politician from one of the two leading Kurdish parties. Ali al-Zaidi was named prime minister-designate on 27–28 April; Al Jazeera described him as a multimillionaire nominated by the coalition of Shia parties holding the parliamentary majority, with 30 days to form a cabinet. On 14 May, parliament passed a vote of confidence and approved 14 of the 23 ministers. AP, via ABC News, reported that nominees for interior, higher education and planning specifically failed to win approval, while Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein kept his post. As of early August, Arab News counted nine ministries still without parliament-approved ministers — interior, defence, planning, higher education, construction and housing, labour and social affairs and youth among them — with al-Zaidi saying the lineup was close to complete and a vote expected.

Two items closer to the present are worth naming precisely because they are unverified. Shafaq News carried a headline, captured from its Kurdistan section index in the 27 August cluster, to the effect that the Coordination Framework is blocking ministerial departures until the cabinet is complete; The Files has not read the article body and could not confirm the timestamp on that specific piece. If it holds, the mechanism is more revealing than the headline: freezing exits stops a partner from banking a portfolio and walking away from the remaining vacancies. Separately, Kurdistan24 reported that Abu Turab al-Tamimi, an MP from the Badr bloc inside the Framework, told the outlet the Shia alliance had not resolved most of its portfolios, naming oil, interior, finance, social affairs and education. That is one named MP in one outlet, and we could not establish the piece’s date.

The arithmetic is also being set outside the room. The Commons Library briefing records that Nouri al-Maliki was proposed for the premiership in January 2026 and withdrawn after US pressure, with President Trump warning that Washington would “no longer help Iraq” if Maliki were chosen. Nor is the eastern channel discreet. EPIC’s Iraq Security and Humanitarian Monitor #556, covering 13–20 August, records Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf in Baghdad praising Iraqi armed factions' role in the Iran–US war and describing “resistance” as a force that had crossed borders. In a separate meeting, Iraqi Parliament Speaker Haybat al-Halbousi urged Iran to give Iraq special treatment so its oil exports could pass through the Strait of Hormuz — the speaker of a sovereign parliament asking Tehran for passage through an international strait.

Assessment: Distrust the framing that Iraq’s cabinet is nearly finished; that has been the official line since May. The vacancies are not an administrative backlog but the unpriced part of the coalition deal, and interior, defence, oil and finance are unfilled for the same reason they were contested — they are the portfolios that convert votes into revenue and guns. Both of this week’s live items rest on a single outlet and one on a section index; hold them lightly. The connection to the lead is the uncomfortable one: Erbil is negotiating its own military relationship with Washington while the federal government has no confirmed defence minister to object.