Baghdad announced the Americans had gone in January, yet a coalition departure is still described as pending

On 18 January, CNN reported that Iraq had announced the full withdrawal of US forces from its federal territory. Two days later Military Times carried the completion of the departure from Ain al-Asad with the attribution left visible in the headline — “Iraq says.” The Jerusalem Post added the qualifier that matters on 19 January: the withdrawal covered federal Iraq, with a presence maintained in the Kurdistan Region. That is an announcement by one government about another’s forces, partially bounded, and it should be held as such. It is also the premise under everything else on this desk, because the political value of a militia’s weapons is indexed to whether foreign troops are still in the country and under what flag they are counted.

The disarmament thread has the freshest timestamps and the weakest sourcing. On 23 August The National reported that the PMF law risked entrenching Iran-backed militias as a parallel force. On 1 September, FDD and its Long War Journal reported that an Iranian-backed militia had set conditions for disarmament — FDD placed “conditions” in scare quotes, and FDD argues a case. Neither the faction nor the substance of the conditions appears in anything this desk has been able to read. On or about 12 September, the aggregator Hatha Alyoum ran “Iraq factions resist disarmament as coalition exit nears,” almost certainly rewriting reporting we have not located. A Wikipedia article titled “2026 United States-led conflict with pro-Iranian Iraqi militias” was edited around the same date. That is a lead, not a source.

In March, the small Syriac-language outlet SyriacPress reported that airstrikes on Iran-aligned PMF units were increasing while the Iraqi Army moved to replace the PMF in the Nineveh Plains — a claim that has not been corroborated here. Set against that, the drone file over the Kurdistan Region has produced events that were reported by major outlets and never resolved: France 24 recorded Iranian drone and missile attacks on Kurdish dissident bases on 13 July, the Defense Post recorded drones downed over Erbil on 16 July, and on 17 August Al Jazeera reported that KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani’s office had been targeted in a drone attack. No attribution of responsibility appeared in that headline, and this desk has found no finding from Baghdad since.

Assessment: A faction that publishes conditions is not disarming; it is pricing its weapons, and the PMF law is the mechanism that converts them into salaries, ranks and a statutory chain of command. Read “disarmament” in most of this coverage as shorthand for absorption on terms yet to be agreed. Two cautions. First, keep the January federal withdrawal and the pending coalition exit separate: conflating them lets each side claim the other’s timetable. Second, when Iraqi state sources go quiet, Washington-based monitors supply the vocabulary by default, and aggregators launder it. The security ministries that would supervise any of this are among the chairs left unfilled since May.