Baghdad sent a Popular Mobilisation Forces law to parliament as the Americans finished leaving

At its 21st regular session on Tuesday 29 September, Iraq’s Council of Ministers voted to approve a draft Popular Mobilisation Forces law and refer it to parliament, according to Shafaq News and The National. The prime minister’s office put it plainly: “The cabinet voted in favour of the Popular Mobilisation Forces bill. It approved referring the bill to parliament for a vote, in accordance with constitutional provisions.” The National noted the timing — the vote came as the US mission in Iraq concluded — and reported that the draft is an inherited one, approved by Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s government in February 2025 and stalled since over retirement provisions and American objections. Shafaq, citing unnamed “informed sources”, has reported twice, on 22 and 29 September, that two amended texts were moving after contentious provisions were stripped, and that some clauses had faced “a US veto”. That is one anonymous source at one Iraqi outlet, repeated; it is the most consequential claim in this file and it is not confirmed.

What the law does depends entirely on which clauses survived, and no one has published the 29 September text. The Washington Institute’s analysis — written over a year ago, and openly arguing for a severe American response — described the bill as converting the single-page 2016 law that created the PMF as a temporary commission into a permanent arm of the state, with its own military academy, and elevating the PMF commander, Faleh al-Fayyad, to ministerial rank with a seat on the Ministerial Committee for National Security. Fayyad was designated by the US Treasury in 2021 for gross human rights abuses. WINEP counts over seventy factions inside the PMF, including the US-designated Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba. Aqeel Abbas of the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative said of the 2016 law: “The law did not establish a hierarchical institutional structure or clear mechanisms for oversight and discipline.”

The government’s own account of disarmament points in a direction worth noting. Sabah al-Numan, military spokesman for the prime minister, told MBN’s Alhurra that the plan calls for weapons to be handed to the PMF and then reorganised, because “the PMF is an Iraqi security institution under the law and is subject to the orders of the commander in chief of the armed forces.” The destination is the commission, not the army. Al-Zaidi’s office had promised in August that “October 1 will mark a new day in the trajectory of the Iraqi state, as Iraq will be free of any foreign military presence,” and that exclusive state control of weapons “represents an essential prerequisite for moving Iraq into a new phase of development and prosperity.” The Israeli Alma Research and Education Center, a partisan outlet oriented to threats to Israel, reported around 7 October that the 30 September deadline passed with no significant change in the militias' status, and that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it was not bound by the government’s timetable.

Assessment: Read the sequencing, not the statements. A bill that stalled for nineteen months under US pressure moved through cabinet in the final week of the American presence — which tells you the pressure was real and that it is now gone. The open question is not whether the law passes but which version does: if Shafaq’s sources are right that clauses were stripped, the Fayyad ministerial-rank provision is the obvious candidate, and its removal would let Baghdad tell Washington the bill is cosmetic while telling the factions it is permanence. Until the text is published, every characterisation of this law — including WINEP’s — describes a draft that may no longer exist. The text is the story.