Iraq closes its last airport to Iranian carriers, and the order came from Zaidi’s office

Baghdad airport suspended flights to and from Iran on Wednesday 23 September, the day new US sanctions took effect on any company worldwide doing business with Iranian airlines, part of a campaign launched in August under the name Operation Economic Outcast. On Friday, Najaf followed, and Erbil and Sulaymaniyah with it, leaving Iranian carriers without a single one of the four Iraqi airports they served. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had set out the mechanism on Monday 21 September: companies dealing with Iranian airlines would be “knocked out of the dollar system,” he said, in remarks reported by The National. The Najaf closure is the only one on the record with a named official. The airport’s director, Hussein Muhanna, told AFP that “all flights were halted between Iran and Najaf airport following a directive from the prime minister’s office to the governor” of Najaf.

The Erbil and Sulaymaniyah suspensions rest on two sources who spoke to Reuters and were not named; Times of Israel attributed the four-airport total to “sources and state media.” Iranian state media had initially reported that Najaf would stay open and were overtaken by the closure. The regional pattern is broader than Iraq: the UAE suspended all Iranian-operated flights to and from the country on Thursday 24 September until further notice, Qatar has restricted flights, and Iran–Oman routes are affected. AFP’s account of who the Iraqi closures hit is specific: Shia pilgrims travelling to shrine cities in Iran, Iranians visiting shrines in Iraq, Iraqi students enrolled at Iranian universities, and patients seeking treatment there.

Assessment: This is the concrete test of the sentence Zaidi delivered in New York, and it runs against his own coalition. The pilgrimage corridor through Najaf is not an abstraction to the Coordination Framework parties that installed him in May; it is their constituents' travel, study and medical care. A directive from the prime minister’s office to a Shia-majority governorate to enforce a US sanctions regime is a far sharper demonstration of state authority than anything in the UNGA text — and far more likely to generate pushback. Two caveats before treating it as settled: the Kurdistan closures are anonymously sourced, and enforcement of a sanctions-driven ban is easier to announce than to sustain.