Iraq sent the militia law to parliament the day the Americans left, and kept Treasury in the room

Iraq’s Council of Ministers voted on Tuesday 30 September to send a law on the Popular Mobilisation Forces to parliament, according to Peregraf, which reported that the same session cancelled a committee created under a 2025 prime ministerial order and gave the Foreign Ministry the task of coordinating with the US Treasury on sanctions listings. The decisions were taken on the eve of the deadline for the exit of US-led coalition forces from Iraq, including from the Kurdistan Region. The National reported the same day that Iraq had approved the law and referred it for a vote as US forces concluded their mission, describing the PMF as an umbrella of mostly Shiite paramilitary groups integrated into state security, several of them backed by Iran. In August, an unnamed Iraqi official told The National that the existing law leaves key questions of personnel and administrative structure unresolved.

What has happened since is reported entirely on unnamed sources, and the sourcing belongs in the sentence rather than a footnote. The New Arab, in an exclusive by Zaid Salim in Baghdad published 7 October, said sources told it that Iraq was preparing to send a revised PMF law to parliament after removing provisions that angered Washington and drew opposition from Sunni and Kurdish parties; the revised text, it reported, would restrict the PMF’s movements, keep it out of cities and prevent it from rivalling the Iraqi army while retaining it as an independent institution reporting to the prime minister. The New Arab is Qatari-owned and the account has not been matched by a wire. Nobody has publicly established whether the bill referred on 30 September and the “revised” text of 7 October are the same document.

A further claim sits on three layers. Iran International, a London-based outlet hostile to the Islamic Republic, relayed a report by Erem News in which a political source close to the Coordination Framework said the government was also seeking amendments capping the PMF chairmanship at two years and bringing professional officers from the regular military into senior posts — a change that would directly affect the current chairman, Falih al-Fayyadh. The same source said the plan faced resistance inside the Coordination Framework, particularly from Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law, which wanted changes tied to a broader political agreement, and Erem News said Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba remained opposed to surrendering weapons. No 48-hour development surfaced on the file, and we could not establish whether the bill is on parliament’s current order paper.

Assessment: The 30 September session is the post-withdrawal architecture in miniature: domestic legalisation of the PMF moving in one direction, management of American sanctions designations formally routed through the Foreign Ministry in the other. Treasury leverage did not leave with the troops, and that is the connection to the currency file — Washington’s remaining instrument in Iraq is the dollar channel, not a division at Ain al-Asad. Distrust the curbing narrative itself: every detail of it reaches us through anonymous sources carried by outlets with regional stakes, and each version flatters a different audience. The one falsifiable claim is al-Fayyadh’s tenure. Until someone puts that on the record, it is a proposal, not a policy.