Baghdad’s weapons deadline arrives while the force it targets is being struck from the air

The disarmament clock and the withdrawal clock share a date. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker, updated 29 July, frames Zaidi’s task as disarming pro-Iran militias while persuading Washington that Iraq is not beholden to Tehran, and notes it is complicated by continuing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian-backed factions inside Iraq. Al Jazeera reported on 12 August that Zaidi told parliament his government was eager to implement a 2024 deal on the question — a Sudani-era instrument, not a new law. That choice is the tell: invoking continuity lets him claim movement without legislating, and without asking a parliament that has not filled his cabinet to vote on the Popular Mobilisation file. A separate PMF Authority bill was pulled from the agenda before the elections and was expected back in the 2026 session; The Files has found no evidence it has been reintroduced.

On the same day, Al Jazeera reported — citing a single unnamed source, as its own headline conceded — that Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani had visited Iraq for meetings on the disarmament plan. The report does not establish whether Tehran was asked to deliver the factions to a Baghdad plan or to set the ceiling on what Baghdad may ask; those are different stories. The most-quoted numbers on this file are older than they look: 238,000 fighters, a $3.6 billion annual budget and more than seventy factions come from a Washington Institute paper published in August 2025, by an institution that argued in the same paper that the US response to a new PMF law should be severe. They are an estimate, thirteen months old, and should be labelled as one wherever they appear this month.

The under-covered mechanism is financial. The House of Commons Library’s July briefing lists Washington’s available tools as further sanctions on the PMF and sanctions on those alleged to channel oil revenue to it. That is where the militia file meets the oil file — and the oil ministry went to the Reconstruction and Development Coalition, the party of outgoing prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, which sits inside the same Coordination Framework that selected Zaidi. FDD, which advocates a hard US line and should be read as such, argued on 30 April that Zaidi’s lack of political experience helped secure consensus within the Framework because it suggested he would take direction willingly. It is a partisan reading of an arithmetic that is nonetheless real: the bloc that chose the prime minister also holds the revenue ministry he would need to squeeze.

Assessment: The structural point gets lost in deadline coverage: the PMF is a state body being degraded from the air while the state demands it disarm. Checkpoints and commanders' residences are not insurgent infrastructure; they are payroll and territory inside the Iraqi security architecture. That makes 30 September less a disarmament date than a bookkeeping date — expect declarations of compliance, integration formulas and renamed formations rather than surrendered weapons. Watch reactivated brand names as the leading indicator; laundered attribution is cheaper than disarming. And treat the Qaani report as what it is: one anonymous source, plausible, unconfirmed.