The PMF bill cleared cabinet on 29 September and has sat in parliament ever since

The cabinet’s 21st regular session on 29 September approved the bill and sent it on. Zaidi’s media office, quoted by The New Region, said simply: “The cabinet voted in favor of the Popular Mobilization Forces bill,” referred to parliament “in accordance with constitutional provisions.” The National reported the following day that approval came as US forces concluded their mission in Iraq, and that critics see the bill cementing the PMF as a permanent national security institution. Peregraf noted a second decision from the same session that has attracted far less attention: coordination on US sanctions was moved to the Foreign Ministry. On 7 October The New Arab reported, as an exclusive and without visible sourcing, that Baghdad had revised the text after American objections — limiting the force’s military role and movements, keeping it out of cities, preventing it rivalling the army, and retaining it as an independent institution reporting to the prime minister.

The parliament that is not voting is the one seated on 29 December 2025, under speaker Haibat al-Halbousi of Taqaddum, after the 11 November 2025 election. Nizar Amedi of the PUK was elected president in mid-April; the Coordination Framework named Zaidi — a businessman with no prior political or governmental experience, per Al Jazeera — as PM-designate at the end of that month. On 14 May parliament confirmed what FDD’s Long War Journal counted as 14 of 23 ministers; Crisis Group described it as “just over half of Zaidi’s cabinet, the minimum constitutional requirement to activate the government.” The Files could not establish how many ministries remain vacant today.

Assessment: A bill that sits is doing work. The PMF law’s value to the Coordination Framework is partly in its pendency: it keeps the institutionalisation question open as leverage, without forcing blocs to take a recorded vote while Washington is still drawing down and the sanctions file has just been handed to the Foreign Ministry. Distrust the New Arab revision story until a second outlet sees text — “revised after US pressure” is exactly the framing both Baghdad and Washington would want circulating. And read the delay against a cabinet that was activated at the constitutional minimum in May: a government assembled to clear a threshold is not one built to pass contested legislation.