Baghdad says Washington granted a sanctions waiver for 40 Iranian flights a day into Najaf

Al Jazeera reported on 2 October that Iraq granted Iranian airlines 40 flights per day into Najaf International Airport after Baghdad said Washington had approved its request for a waiver. Mahan Air, the carrier most heavily sanctioned by the United States, is excluded from the arrangement. Demonstrators had gathered outside the airport on 28 September demanding it reopen to flights — the pilgrimage traffic into Najaf is a local economy as much as a religious one. The structure of the deal is the point: the exemption is claimed by the Iraqi government, not announced by the US Treasury or State Department in anything retrievable, and the exclusion of a single named airline is the price paid for the other thirty-nine-plus daily slots. Two days after the last American soldier was declared out, the mechanism of American influence on Iraqi commerce is operating normally.

That influence meets a state whose finances leave little room. Iraqi Finance Ministry data reported by Shafaq News in early September showed Iraq spent roughly 44.627 trillion dinars ($34.1 billion) on public-sector salaries and social welfare in the first half of 2026 — close to 82 per cent of total federal spending for the period. The same squeeze drives the long fight with Erbil, where the KRG said in January that Baghdad had paid only 41 per cent of the region’s three-year entitlements against 58.3 trillion dinars ($44.8 billion) allocated, calling the shortfall an investment blockade; that is one disputing party’s figure. Baghdad’s stated counter-case, as summarised by The Arab Weekly in June, is that Erbil has not disclosed full oil, tax and border-crossing revenues or settled the real headcount of employees and pensioners.

Assessment: Read the Najaf waiver as the shape of post-withdrawal Iraq rather than as an aviation story. The leverage that mattered was never the brigades; it was the dollar clearing system, the sanctions list and the budget. Baghdad announcing an American exemption that Washington has not itself announced also tells you who needs the announcement — a government that must show Najaf’s street something after the troops left. Distrust tidy readings of the Kurdistan salary numbers in either direction: both sides publish the figure that indicts the other, and no audited reconciliation of KRG revenues or payroll exists in public. With 82 cents of every federal dinar going to wages and welfare, the margin for any of it is thin.