Iraq’s militia law is reportedly being rewritten again, but no one has produced the text

The New Arab reported on 7 October, in an exclusive bylined Zaid Salim in Baghdad, that Iraq is preparing to send a revised Popular Mobilisation Forces law to parliament after removing provisions that had drawn objections from Washington and from Sunni and Kurdish parties. According to the outlet’s unnamed sources, the revision restricts the PMF’s freedom of movement, keeps its forces away from cities and prevents it from rivalling the Iraqi army in weapons and organisation — while retaining the PMF as an independent security institution outside the defence and interior ministries, with its own chief of staff and operations command reporting directly to the prime minister as commander-in-chief. It would replace the 2016 law passed during the war against Islamic State. The changes are backed by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and a majority of Shia Coordination Framework leaders, the same sources said.

That account sits awkwardly against reporting from ten days earlier. On 29 and 30 September, Shafaq News, Peregraf and The National carried items stating that the cabinet had voted on the PMF law and referred it to parliament; The Files has read the headlines and URLs but not the body text, and has not reconciled the two accounts. Either the bill was pulled and re-revised after referral, or one of the reports is imprecise. The precedent is instructive: an earlier version was approved by cabinet in February 2025 and received two parliamentary readings before stalling, and in August 2025 the government withdrew it entirely. The New Arab reported at the time that lawmakers were skipping sessions to deny quorum rather than voting the bill down.

The withdrawn 2025 draft was a different document. It aimed to fold the PMF into the armed forces under a unified military hierarchy, standardise salaries, pensions and ranks, and retire ageing or controversial commanders, including long-serving PMF chairman Faleh al-Fayyad. The version now described does the opposite on the central question: it preserves a parallel command structure and attaches it to the prime minister personally. Al-Zaidi, named for the premiership in late April 2026 after weeks of bloc negotiation, formed a government in May with only 14 of 23 ministerial portfolios filled, according to FDD’s Long War Journal — a hawkish Washington publisher, though the count is checkable against the Council of Representatives record. The Files could not establish how many posts are filled today.

Assessment: Treat this as a claim about a bill, not a fact about one. The entire substance rests on anonymous sources at one outlet, Qatari-owned and with a settled editorial line on Iran-aligned Iraqi factions; there is no named official, no draft text, no readout from the Prime Minister’s Office. The meaningful test is not what the draft says but whether a quorum assembles to read it — absenteeism, not votes, killed the last attempt. Note also what the reported concessions concede: movement, urban deployment, armament. Not the command line. A force answering directly to the premier rather than to a ministry is the architecture, and that survived the rewrite.