Two anonymous reports say al-Zaidi is turning on the factions that installed him
One outlet says the PMF law is being rewritten under American pressure. Another carries a headline saying the prime minister has warned his own coalition’s armed factions on disarmament. Neither is a document.
What is confirmed is narrow. Iraq’s Council of Ministers voted on Tuesday 29 September, in its twenty-first regular session, to approve a draft law governing the Popular Mobilisation Forces and refer it to parliament, according to Shafaq News. The National reported the following day that critics fear the bill would entrench the PMF as a permanent national security institution, and noted that the cabinet vote landed as the US mission concluded. The text has not been published. On 7 October The New Arab published what it described as an exclusive from Baghdad reporting that a revised bill is being prepared after US objections — one that would restrict the force’s movements, keep it out of cities, prevent it rivalling the Iraqi army and retain it as an independent body reporting to the prime minister. The Files could not establish whether that account rests on named or anonymous officials.
The same window produced a second claim in the same direction. Shafaq News' Iraq index on 7 October carried an item headlined “SOURCE: PM al-Zaidi warns CF’s factions on disarmament” — the “SOURCE” prefix is the outlet’s own convention for anonymously sourced reporting. The Files has the headline and not the body. No Coordination Framework figure has responded on the record. The context is a government with thin authority: Ali Falih al-Zaidi, a banker and political newcomer born in 1985, was nominated by the Coordination Framework on 27 April and sworn in on 14 May, and parliament approved his programme along with only 14 of 23 cabinet nominees, leaving nine ministries vacant at the vote — gaps the Long War Journal attributed to disagreement “between Tehran and Washington and their partners.”
Assessment: Note the shape rather than the content. Within forty-eight hours, two outlets carried unsourced or thinly sourced reports casting a prime minister installed by the Coordination Framework as restraining its armed wing — one in an outlet read in Washington, one in an outlet read in Baghdad. That symmetry is itself the datum. A government that cannot fill nine ministries has limited means of confronting the PMF, but considerable incentive to be described as trying, particularly in the weeks after the Americans left and the question of what the US gets for leaving becomes live. Until the cabinet-approved draft is published, treat the revised bill as an argument being conducted through leaks, not a legislative fact.