Al-Zaidi reported to be bargaining with armed factions over the head of his own committee

Shafaq News reported within the past 24 hours that Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has held separate talks with leaders of armed factions opposed to surrendering their weapons, and that members of the committee assigned to negotiate with those groups have objected to his doing so. The report rests on one unnamed source; Shafaq is an Erbil-founded outlet with a Baghdad desk and is not neutral ground on militia questions. This is a claim about a process, not a confirmed event, and no faction and no statement from the prime minister’s office has been reported on the record in response. The detail that travels furthest is incidental to the dispute: a committee formally charged with negotiating with armed groups exists inside the al-Zaidi government. Its chair, mandate and date of establishment were not in the report, and the text does not say whether the track concerns weapons handover or absorption into the Popular Mobilization structure. Those are different stories with different endpoints.

The context is a state that no longer has an American presence to argue about. The US military said on 30 September 2026 that its withdrawal from Iraq was complete, ending the 12-year anti-ISIS mission, according to the Associated Press; US forces had already left Ain al-Asad in January 2026, with Iraqi forces assuming control. Six weeks before the declared completion date, on 2 August, Iraq’s Security Media Cell denied reports that US aircraft had landed at Ain al-Asad — a denial carried by Iran International, a partisan outlet on Iraqi and Iranian military questions. On the legal side, the Congressional Research Service’s Iraq in-focus, updated 8 June 2026, describes the Popular Mobilization as a state force and notes that some militias were later legally consolidated into Iraq’s security sector under that framework. The disarmament committee is therefore negotiating, at least in part, with men already on the federal payroll.

That negotiation is happening inside a cabinet that took almost a year to assemble. Al-Zaidi was voted in on 14 May 2026 with only 14 of 23 ministries filled, according to FDD’s Long War Journal. On 15 October parliament voted on deputy prime ministers and the remaining ministers — Muhsin al-Mandalawi is recorded as taking office as deputy prime minister that day — and created two new portfolios: a Ministry of Digital Economy, Governance, Science and Technology, and a separate cabinet seat for tourism. Shafaq reports that Coordination Framework leaders, who hold parliament’s largest bloc, had agreed to the tourism ministry as part of a compromise over disputed seats. Eleven months and four days separated the 11 November 2025 election from a full cabinet.

Assessment: Treat the bilateral-talks claim with the caution a single anonymous source deserves, and treat the committee’s existence as the harder fact. A prime minister dealing directly with faction leaders is either routing around a body he does not control or pre-cooking a deal he does not trust it to deliver; both readings describe weakness, not command. Note also what the quota settlement reveals about the method on offer: confronted with a deadlock over who gets which ministry, the system invented two more ministries. A disarmament track run by the same political class will be tempted toward the same solution — more posts, more payroll, fewer guns surrendered. Watch for whether the track is handover or integration. Only one of those reduces anything.