Thirty-four days after cabinet sent the PMF law to parliament, its whereabouts are unestablished

Iraq’s Council of Ministers voted in its 21st regular session on 29 September 2026 to approve a draft law governing the Popular Mobilisation Forces and send it to parliament. The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed the vote in a single line — “The cabinet voted in favour of the Popular Mobilization Forces bill” — reported by The National and The New Region. The text originated with the Sudani government in February 2025 and had been stalled since. An Iraqi official speaking anonymously to The National said the law would give the PMF “a permanent, legally protected status as a parallel armed institution inside the Iraqi state”; that characterisation rests on one unnamed source and should be read as a critic’s framing, not a reading of the text. Shafaq News, citing unnamed informed sources, reported that contentious provisions facing what those sources called a “US veto” had been stripped from two amended drafts, and that others still draw American objection.

The timing is the point. The cabinet acted the day before the US-led coalition’s military mission in Iraq formally ended on 30 September 2026, closing a drawdown that began on 18 August 2025 and that had already emptied Ain al-Asad airbase in Anbar by mid-January, leaving the residual American presence concentrated in the Kurdistan Region. Parliament legislated on the PMF once before, in 2016, placing it under the prime minister as commander-in-chief; the 2026 bill is the second attempt to settle the same question and the first with no coalition mission in the country. Peregraf reported that the same cabinet session moved coordination on US sanctions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — a procedural change that determines who in Baghdad answers OFAC.

Assessment: The Files cannot establish whether the bill has had a first reading, been scheduled, or been quietly parked, and that gap is itself the story worth tracking. Referral to parliament is where Iraqi legislation on armed groups has historically gone to be stored rather than passed, because the speaker’s calendar is the least attributable veto in the system. If the bill moves, the reading will be that American pressure expired with the mission on 30 September. If it does not move, the pressure outlived the troops — or the Coordination Framework has concluded that codifying the PMF is more dangerous to its own balance than leaving it undefined.