Iraq’s government reaches month five with interior and defence still unfilled

Parliament approved 14 of Iraq’s 23 ministers on 14–15 May 2026, according to FDD’s Long War Journal, which tracked the vote. Planning, higher education, interior, reconstruction and housing, and culture were put to the chamber and not approved. Defence, labour, youth and migration were never voted on at all. Interior and defence are two of the five portfolios Iraqi practice treats as sovereign, alongside oil, finance and foreign affairs. Prime Minister Ali Falih Kadhim al-Zaidi — a 41-year-old banker and chairman of Al Wataniya Holding Group, sworn in on 14 May with no prior public office — told lawmakers he would bring the remaining nine names to a vote after Eid al-Adha at the end of May. The US Congressional Research Service product on Iraq, in the version available to this desk and apparently current to early June, still described the government as “14 of 23”.

The arithmetic that produced this government was contested from the start. Nouri al-Maliki was the Coordination Framework’s candidate, selected on 24 January and rejected by Donald Trump three days later; Long War Journal frames Washington’s leverage as running through the deposit of Iraqi oil revenues at the New York Federal Reserve, an analytical reading from a think-tank-affiliated outlet rather than a wire report. Nizar Amidi of the PUK was elected president on 11 April and took office the following day; the House of Commons Library records that the KDP boycotted the vote. That library’s briefing CBP-10829, registered as updated 13 October, states that “at the time of writing, no new regional government has been formed” in the Kurdistan Region — eleven months after the federal election. It also notes that since June the federal government “has announced the formation of a cabinet committee to oversee the disarming of armed factions and their integration into the Iraqi state military.”

Assessment: The verb in the Commons Library line is the whole story: announced. A committee that exists on paper to disarm factions, in a cabinet where the interior and defence ministries may still be vacant, is a placeholder for a bargain nobody has struck. Two cautions. First, this desk has no confirmation either way on whether those nine seats were filled since early June — five months of silence in our sourcing is a gap, not a finding, and it is answerable with one call to the Council of Representatives media office. Second, both Washington and Tehran congratulated this government. A prime minister acceptable to both is usually a prime minister empowered by neither.