Baghdad’s cabinet sent the PMF law to parliament the day before the Americans left

Iraq’s Council of Ministers, chaired by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, voted on Tuesday 29 September to approve the Popular Mobilization Forces draft law and refer it to parliament, according to a statement from the premier’s media office carried by Rudaw and The New Region. “The cabinet voted in favor of the Popular Mobilization Forces bill,” the office said. “It approved referring the bill to parliament for a vote, in accordance with constitutional provisions.” The text includes the PMF Service and Retirement Law and would organise the Popular Mobilization Commission along the lines of other state security agencies, filling gaps in the 2016 law, which Rudaw notes comprised only three provisions and left structure, retirement, benefits and compensation for the families of dead fighters unaddressed. The National reports that passage would place PMF personnel on equal footing with other security institutions, further entrenching the force as a permanent national body. The same draft was approved by the Sudani government in February 2025 and then shelved amid intra-Shia disagreement.

Al-Zaidi told the UN General Assembly last week that his government is “striving to ensure that the state is the ultimate decision-maker in matters of peace and war, and that weapons and tools of power remain in the hands of its constitutional institutions,” and that with the coalition mission ending Iraq was “moving from military cooperation to economic and development cooperation.” AP reports that he has pushed his militia disarmament deadline to June 2027, telling the New York Times of the new date earlier this month — roughly thirteen months out, from a government sworn in on 14 May 2026. Douglas Silliman, the former US ambassador to Iraq, told Al Jazeera on 29 September that what follows is “going to be a very difficult series of decisions… Both for the militias and for Prime Minister al-Zaidi and his defence team,” and framed the withdrawal as part of an al-Zaidi strategy to politically weaken the armed factions.

Assessment: Two readings of the sequencing are available and the day does not choose between them. Either the bill is the price of militia acquiescence in a withdrawal that removes their stated reason for existing, or it is the institutional cage Silliman describes — pensions and service grades as a slower instrument than disarmament. Resist two things. First, The New Region’s line that the bill is “heavily opposed by Washington”: the recorded US objection is to earlier drafts, and no named State Department or Embassy Baghdad response to Tuesday’s vote has surfaced. Second, treat cabinet referral as a legislative event, not an outcome; parliament buried this text once already. Watch the retirement-age clauses, and whether Washington’s control of Iraq’s dollar shipments — used at least once this year, per the New York Times — speaks where troops no longer do.