Nujaba rejects amended PMF bill, calling the changes the work of ‘Wahhabi and Zionist hands'

Harakat al-Nujaba, a US-designated Iran-aligned armed faction, rejected amendments to the draft law governing the Popular Mobilisation Forces on Wednesday, saying in a statement reported by 964media that “suspicious Wahhabi and Zionist hands” were behind them. The amended draft, according to the same report, drops the PMF commission’s volunteer service department among other structural changes; the full text of the revisions has not been published. The bill reached parliament after the cabinet approved it on 30 September 2026 and referred it for a vote, as The National reported, in the same week that US forces concluded their counter-ISIS mission in Iraq. A paper from the NESA Center describes the bill as designed to grant the PMF greater autonomy as a military and security institution, with enhanced financial and professional privileges for members and an expanded organisational structure, and records that the vote has been postponed.

The sequence matters more than any single statement in it: cabinet approval on 30 September, amendment in the Council of Representatives, then a faction denouncing the amendments on 4 November. Earlier in the cycle, the deputy head of the Sadiqun parliamentary bloc, Ahmed al-Moussawi, confirmed the government would send the law to parliament, and the Parliamentary Rights Bloc said it should pass during the current session, calling it nearly ready for a vote but requiring further review. Those are the pointers available; both reached this desk through a paid aggregation newsletter rather than a primary record, and neither has been checked against the parliamentary text.

Assessment: Read Nujaba’s statement as a tell, not as theology. The factions do not issue takfiri-flavoured denunciations of legislation that serves them; the loudest objection is the clearest public evidence that the amended draft narrows something the factions wanted — plausibly recruitment and the volunteer pipeline. That cuts against the standard Western framing of the PMF law as pure consolidation of militia power, and it suggests the fight inside the Coordination Framework is between the armed groups and the state apparatus they nominally sit inside. What is still missing is the amended text itself. Until someone publishes it, every claim about what the bill does — including this one — rests on partisan readings of a document nobody has seen.