Baghdad tells Washington its territory will not launch attacks, as ministers warn Iraq is unready for war

Al-Zaidi spoke with Trump on Thursday 5 November and told him Iraqi territory would not be used as a launching point for attacks on neighbouring countries, pressing respect for state sovereignty and for diplomacy, according to the Prime Minister’s Media Office readout reported by Al Jazeera and carried in a Fox News live file. The same day, Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told the private Iraqi channel Dijlah TV that “pushing Iraqi society into the war will lead to a disaster” and that “we are not prepared for war. Neither Iraqi society nor the armed forces are prepared for war.” Of the ceasefire, Hussein said: “The war has not stopped. It has not ended.” He added that “the Americans would not hesitate to target Iraq” — while confirming that Washington has not officially notified Baghdad of any plan to resume strikes on Iran. That second half of the sentence is the operative one.

Asharq Al-Awsat, the Saudi-owned daily, reported within the last day that al-Zaidi has granted army commanders “exceptional powers to deter armed groups” — authority to confront armed violations immediately without referring decisions upward — and that Iraqi political officials describe unprecedented alarm at reports that armed factions have updated target lists on IRGC orders. Both claims rest on unnamed officials in a single Saudi-owned outlet, on a story about Iraqi militias threatening Gulf states; no Council of Ministers decision number or Joint Operations Command statement has surfaced. Separately, a claim circulating in Baghdad — attributed to an unnamed “senior official in Sulaymaniyah province” via Al-Maalomah News Agency, and reaching this desk through an aggregator — holds that Trump warned of a large-scale attack on Iran between 7 and 11 November and that al-Zaidi would close Iraqi airspace. No wire has corroborated it; the official readout mentions neither a date window nor airspace.

Assessment: Hold the two halves of Hussein’s remarks apart. A foreign minister saying strikes are conceivable is rhetoric for a domestic audience that needs preparing; a foreign minister confirming no official notification has arrived is a datum, and it points away from an imminent American decision rather than toward one. The airspace claim is cheap to make and cheap to disprove, which is its only virtue: by Thursday the 12th it will be either corroborated by NOTAMs or exposed as how Baghdad rumour travels. Watch the Civil Aviation Authority, not the outlets. The harder question the day leaves open is whether “exceptional powers” is a decree or a briefing-room phrase — and whether Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba answer Hussein at all.