Baghdad concedes there will be no disarmament deal this year, keeps June 2027 date
An adviser to Prime Minister Ali Al Zaidi told a Chatham House conference the government will not reach agreement with the Iran-backed factions in 2026. It is the second deadline in three months, and the first was abandoned without consequence.
Yousif Al Dunainawi, an adviser to Al Zaidi, said on Wednesday 11 November that the government would not conclude an agreement with the armed factions this year, speaking at the Iraq Initiative conference at Chatham House in conversation with Mina Al-Oraibi, editor-in-chief of The National, which reported the remarks on 12 November. The standing commitment — restricting all weapons to the state — remains 30 June 2027, and Al Dunainawi described implementation as proceeding “in an incremental way” rather than as a single handover. The same report cited Iraqi security chiefs saying two militia groups are resisting negotiations for “personal interests” while a third has shown willingness to engage. The groups were not named in the account.
The June 2027 date is itself a replacement. The original deadline was 30 September 2026, timed to the end of the US-led coalition mission, with government spokesman Haider al-Aboudi warning that weapons outside state authority after it could face legal measures. On 19 September, Qasim Al Araji, security adviser to the prime minister, told The National that “there is no specific deadline for completing the mission” and called reports of a fixed timeframe “completely incorrect.” Two days later Al Zaidi told the New York Times the government aimed to finish by June 2027; on 22 September he discussed disarmament by phone with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the date formally moved. A UK House of Commons Library briefing published in late October refers instead to a 2028 deadline — a discrepancy the Files has not been able to reconcile, and which may describe PMF integration rather than disarmament.
Assessment: A deadline that slips twice in ten weeks is not a deadline; it is a negotiating position held in public for an American audience. Note what the adviser did not say: no mechanism, no sequence, no named group. The Washington tracker CTP-ISW reported on 10 November, on the basis of Iraqi press and unnamed sources, that factions are shuffling weapons between each other and double-registering the same stock — claims we cannot confirm and that come from an interested analyst. Treat them as a description of what evasion would look like, not proof it happened. The honest read of Wednesday is that Baghdad has bought seven more months and told everyone so.