A second PMF bill is said to be in preparation, a week after the coalition’s last troops left Iraq

In its 21st regular session on 29 September, the Council of Ministers voted to approve a draft law governing the Popular Mobilisation Forces and referred it to parliament, Shafaq News reported. The same session, according to the Kurdish outlet Peregraf, cancelled a committee created under a 2025 prime ministerial order and assigned the Foreign Ministry responsibility for coordinating on US sanctions — a procedural line most coverage passed over, and one that moves the sanctions file from an ad hoc body into a ministry. The National, writing on 30 September, framed the bill as potentially legitimising the PMF as a permanent national security institution and set out critics' objections, noting the timing against the conclusion of the US mission.

On 7 October The New Arab published a Baghdad-datelined exclusive reporting that Iraq is preparing to send a revised version of the law to parliament after American objections. Per that report, the revision would limit the force’s powers and military role while keeping it an independent security institution reporting to the prime minister, restrict its movements, keep it out of cities and prevent it from rivalling the Iraqi army. This is a claim, not an event: one outlet, Qatari-funded, with its own line on Iraqi militia politics, and no published text. The Files has seen no second outlet, no committee referral and no parliamentary calendar for a first reading. The New Arab separately reported on 8 October, in an analysis rather than a wire dispatch, that the last troops of the anti-Islamic State coalition left Iraq in the week to 8 October after twelve years. No CENTCOM or Iraqi Defence Ministry statement of record was retrieved for that departure.

Assessment: Two things are being conflated by everyone writing about this, and should not be. The cabinet bill exists and is on the record; the revision exists only in one newspaper’s account of what officials intend. Treat the second as a bargaining position being briefed, possibly by people who want Washington to believe it, until a draft surfaces. The more telling item is the Foreign Ministry’s new sanctions-coordination brief: that is a government preparing to negotiate over designations rather than absorb them. Watch the parliamentary calendar, not the leaks. A bill referred in late September with no first reading scheduled by mid-October is a bill whose sponsors are not yet confident of the room.