Shafaq News

Iraq has set September 30 as the final date for surrenderingweapons held “outside state institutions” and a committee now exists to foldthe armed factions into the security forces and move their arms to statecustody. Whose weapons move, under whose command, and what becomes of those whorefuse remain unsettled.

: Iraq to place armed factions' weapons under state control: What we know so far

September 30 also closes the US-led coalition against ISIS,and the overlap is deliberate. Government spokesman Haider al-Aboudi has boundthe two events together, warning that any weapon outside the state frameworkafter that date “becomes unregulated” and open to legal treatment. Thealignment aims at the argument that has kept some factional weapons in placefor two decades: that they answer a foreign military presence on Iraqi soil. End the presence, and the rationale is supposed to end with it.

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Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has built his program aroundthat logic. A businessman and banker from Dhi Qar with no prior senior office,he took power in May 2026 as the compromise candidate of the CoordinationFramework, the Shia bloc that dominates parliament, and did so withWashington's open backing. The Framework has since authorized him to pursue astate monopoly on arms and to sever the Popular Mobilization Forces from partyand political attachments. That umbrella, state-funded and formally part of thesecurity apparatus, absorbed most of the Shia armed groups after ISIS overrannorthern Iraq in 2014, yet its Iran-aligned components have kept operating ontheir own terms.

: EXPLAINER: From the fight against ISIS to US withdrawal talks

Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of the Patriotic Shiite Movement,opened the current phase when he detached the Saraya al-Salam from his movementin late May and placed it under state command. Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib ImamAli followed with steps to hand parts of their PMF-registered formations to thegovernment, and the Commander-in-Chief's spokesman, Sabah al-Numan, announced acommittee ordered by al-Zaidi to build the integration mechanisms and transferweapons, equipment, and bases to the competent authorities. Al-Zaidi has saidthe bulk of factional arms already sits under state custody, with a smallremainder awaiting a transfer mechanism.

: What does Iraq's new government promise? A guide to Ali Al-Zaidi's ministerial program

The compliance is uneven, and the resistance is concentratedamong the groups closest to Tehran. Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, andKataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have refused to enter the process, holding to whatthey call resistance weapons and pinning any move on external conditions, chiefamong them the presence of foreign forces.

Mustafa Ajeel, a security researcher, reads the September 30date as engineered against the withdrawal schedule, “which makes the comingweeks pivotal for ending the justification for arms outside the state.” Thatjustification does not dissolve on its own, and the factions weighing itdisagree sharply on what the deadline requires of them.

Ahmed Adnan, a member of the Sadiqoon Movement, thepolitical wing of Asaib Ahl al-Haq under Qais al-Khazali, rejects the framingof surrender outright. What is underway, he told Shafaq News, is confining thedecision to use force to the state rather than stripping the factions of theirweapons, which remain inside the PMF.

He casts the effort as “a national, religious, and politicalundertaking that must reach every faction without exemption” and treats thecoalition's departure as the opening for a broader reckoning over the future ofthese arms rather than its conclusion.

Adnan al-Kinani, a security and political expert, draws theopposite line. The end of “the occupation” means armed resistance has run itscourse, leaving factions to choose full integration into the state or a shiftinto politics. He also locates the fault line inside the factional camp itself,between those who accept the government's course and those who reject it, “aninternal division he argues must be resolved at the root rather than managed atthe surface.”

That internal split is where the deadline meets its hardesttest. Moain al-Kadhimi, a leader in the Badr Organization under Hadi al-Amiri,a close ally of Iran, ties the holdouts' compliance to "a complete andactual US withdrawal, along with guarantees against any return of Americanmilitary action." Groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyidal-Shuhada, he told Shafaq News, want firm assurances on that point beforemoving, and while the government can manage the security file, it needs a decisivepolitical choice to carry it.

Any final settlement, in his reading, rests on a balance ofcommitments between Baghdad and Washington and on full Iraqi sovereignty overits territory and airspace.

: Iraq’s armed factions and the disarmament debate: Why unity masks deep divisions

The 2024 agreement between Baghdad and Washington sets thattimeline. Its first phase closed in January 2026 with the end of combatmissions, a partial pullback, and a shift toward bilateral securitycooperation. The second phase runs to this September and ends the use of Iraqibases to support operations in Syria, narrowing the relationship to limitedadvisory coordination. The framework gives the factions a fixed date to measureagainst, and it gives the holdouts a condition they can claim has not yet beenmet.

Enforcement is the gap the declared mechanism has notclosed. A committee to integrate fighters and move weapons addresses thefactions already inclined to cooperate. It says nothing about the onesrefusing, and no announced procedure yet establishes who takes physical custodyof their arms, how the PMF is restructured around “their resistance groups,” orwhat legal treatment means in practice for a group with parliamentary weightand armed capacity. Al-Kinani's warning about roots over surfaces lands here:“the deadline can be declared enforceable without being enforceable against theparties that matter most.”

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.