Baghdad says Washington has cleared 40 daily Iranian flights into Najaf, Mahan Air excepted

The office of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said on Friday 2 October that Iraq had secured a US sanctions exemption allowing Iranian airlines, “with the exception of Mahan Air, to operate 40 flights daily to and from Najaf,” in the wording carried by AFP. Al Jazeera, Arab News Pakistan and the Kuwaiti Arab Times all reported the announcement; Arab Times described it as expanding an earlier US exemption that had covered Iraqi carriers. No corresponding statement from the US Treasury or the State Department has been located. The political cost of the closure was visible before the waiver: an AFP photograph dated 28 September shows demonstrators outside Al-Najaf Al-Ashraf International Airport demanding the facility be reopened to flights from Iran. Najaf is the destination of the Iranian pilgrimage traffic, and the airport is one of the few places where Baghdad’s position between Tehran and Washington is measured in daily arrivals.

The timing sits inside a tight sequence. The withdrawal completed on 30 September; the waiver was announced on 2 October; on 3 October Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a press statement for Iraq’s National Day referencing al-Zaidi’s July 2026 visit to Washington and his White House meeting with President Trump. Al Jazeera attributed to Trump a characterisation of the Iraq deployment as a “very expensive excursion into Hell,” paraphrasing a longer remark. What Washington has not done is confirm the Najaf arrangement in its own voice, and the Mahan Air carve-out — the one Iranian carrier most heavily sanctioned — is the detail that makes the Iraqi account plausible rather than proving it.

Assessment: This is Baghdad monetising geography. The operative actor is the Iraqi prime minister’s office, which sought the carve-out, announced it, and gets the credit in Najaf whether or not Washington ever says the number 40 out loud. That asymmetry is the point: an unconfirmed exemption is cheaper for the Americans than a published one and more useful to al-Zaidi than a quiet one. Until a Treasury licence or State readout appears, treat the figure as an Iraqi disclosure. And read Rubio’s National Day text for what it omits — whether it says sovereignty, whether it says armed groups — because three days after the last troops left, the vocabulary is the policy.