The only group agreeing to hand over weapons is the one with no protector in Baghdad

On 11 September Zaidi met the Yazidi Cause Alliance and announced that the Sinjar Resistance Units, the all-Yazidi YBS, would begin handing over their weapons to the state, with eligible members integrated into the security forces. The New Region reported it on 16 September, noting the group’s links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party; FDD’s Long War Journal wrote it up around 19 September. Nothing retrieved shows a handover event, an inventory or a timetable — this is an announcement, not an execution. It is also the cheapest possible one. YBS is Yazidi, PKK-linked and outside the Coordination Framework’s protection, so delivering it costs Zaidi nothing with the bloc that made him prime minister while giving him something to show Washington and Ankara. Long War Journal is published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington advocacy organisation with a declared position on Iran-aligned actors.

The groups that would make disarmament meaningful have been explicit about terms. On 1 September, FDD and Long War Journal reported that Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada set conditions for placing its arms under government control: complete US withdrawal by 30 September, legislation providing rights for PMF members, full federal control over Iraqi territory, stronger air defences operated solely under Iraqi authority, and removal of the PKK. The Commons Library briefing records that the government has presented a bill to parliament to standardise salaries, pensions and ranks between the armed forces and the PMF — the answer to the second condition. The limits are visible too: in August, FDD reported that the Counter-Terrorism Service detained Abbas Hussein al-Yaqoubi, an official in both a US-designated group and the PMF, and released him within 24 hours.

The cabinet’s own machinery is thin. The Commons Library notes that since June the government has announced a cabinet committee to oversee disarming armed factions and integrating them into the state military. But parliament’s confidence vote on 14 May approved only 14 of Zaidi’s 23 ministers, and defence and interior were not among them, per Long War Journal’s report the following day. Whether those two posts have since been filled is not established in anything retrieved for this brief — and a disarmament programme run by a cabinet missing both security ministries is a programme run by the prime minister’s office alone.

Assessment: Read the pay-parity bill, not the weapons rhetoric. What is being negotiated is not the dissolution of the armed factions but their price of admission: ranks, pensions, salary scales, and a state that absorbs them on their terms. Integration on those terms is the opposite of disarmament — it converts an irregular force into a budget line with a legal claim. The Yaqoubi release, 24 hours from arrest, is the practical demonstration of where authority stops; FDD’s framing of it is partisan, but the timeline is the fact. Watch for whether the salary bill passes before or after 30 September. The sequencing will tell you who is conceding.