Forty days remain. On September 30, Iraq’s government has promised that all weapons will belong to the state alone. American troops will finish withdrawing the same day. Nothing about that coincidence is accidental. It is a deadline written by Washington and Baghdad together, and it now hangs over Iraq like a blade.
Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, a political newcomer who took office in May, has staked his government on it. “After September 30, we will not allow any entity besides the state to carry any weapons,” he told reporters after meeting President Trump at the White House in July. Some militias have already complied. The Peace Brigades loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr disbanded months ago. Two smaller Iran-aligned factions, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali, announced in June that they would place their weapons under state control.
But the deadline that binds al-Zaidi is now dividing the very coalition that put him in office.
The Coordination Framework, the Shia bloc underpinning his government, is splitting three ways.
Some factions want to trade their weapons for ministries. Others, cut out of the cabinet, refuse outright. Abu Alaa al-Walai, secretary-general of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, put the second camp’s logic bluntly: “Whoever wants to hand over his weapons, we are ready to buy them.”
Kataib Hezbollah dismissed the prime minister’s warnings on X as “empty bravado,” and hinted at retaliation under the principle of “an eye for an eye.” Sheikh Akram al-Kaabi of Harakat al-Nujaba went further, casting the weapons as necessary to resist what he called America’s “malicious project” to “steal and plunder Iraq’s wealth.” Only Hadi al-Amiri of the Badr Organization, Iran’s oldest Iraqi proxy, has tried to calm things, urging “the language of moderation” on all sides.
Tehran is not standing by. Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani has made repeated, unannounced trips to Baghdad this year, most recently on August 10, urging factions to hold their weapons as leverage rather than surrender them. His message, according to sources close to the militias, was to avoid concessions to Washington “to take government posts.” Iran has reason to be desperate. It has already lost Syria. Hezbollah is under siege in Lebanon. Iraq’s militias, alongside the Houthis, are what remains of the “rings of fire” Tehran built to encircle its adversaries.
That desperation carries costs Iraqis are already paying. Iranian-aligned factions attacked Saudi Arabia this summer, drawing joint American and Saudi strikes that killed at least twenty fighters and further constricted the Strait of Hormuz, through which Iraq’s oil exports collapsed from 4.2mn barrels a day in February to 1.45mn in May. Tehran’s own parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was in Baghdad this week pressing for a “new regional order” that keeps the militias intact in some form.
Washington’s patience has a price tag attached. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told al-Zaidi in July that a deeper US-Iraq partnership requires Baghdad to “assert its sovereignty and disarm the Iran-aligned militias.” Days later, American firms signed more than $60bn in energy, healthcare, and technology deals with Iraq, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Halliburton. They have tremendous oil reserves,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “We’re going to have a long-term relationship with a man that will be a great leader.” The subtext was unmistakable: disarmament and dollars are now the same conversation.
What almost no one will say plainly is what becomes of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the state-salaried umbrella that many of these militias formally belong to. Renad Mansour, who directs the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, calls full disarmament “an impossible task,” noting the factions are “deeply embedded inside Iraqi territory.”
Inna Rudolf of King’s College London expects al-Zaidi to avoid confrontation, relying instead on “quiet diplomacy,” trading concessions behind closed doors rather than forcing a fight he might not win. A darker layer lies beneath the politics. Human rights investigators, including Amnesty International, have long documented extrajudicial killings and abductions carried out by PMF-linked militias, disproportionately against Sunni men swept up in the campaign against ISIS and its aftermath.
For years, families of former Ba’athists and ex-regime officials have accused these same factions of using “de-Baathification” as cover for score-settling. That history is precisely why militia commanders now fear the anti-corruption drive al-Zaidi has launched alongside disarmament. His government has already seized tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold from arrested officials. Militia leaders, who by some estimates have siphoned billions from Iraq’s oil economy and from Iranian, European and American commercial channels, want guarantees before they disarm: guarantees of Amnesty, and guarantees that stolen wealth stays theirs.
Iraq’s Kurdistan region sits outside this entire drama. Its Peshmerga forces are not covered by the September 30 deadline, and Washington maintains a quiet presence near Erbil that it does not officially acknowledge.
What happens next is genuinely unknowable. Iraq could stumble into a fight between its own army and the militias that once fought alongside it against the Islamic State. It could instead reach a face-saving compromise that leaves the PMF’s structure largely untouched behind a new legal veneer.
What is harder to dismiss is the direction of travel. Iraq’s neighbours and patrons no longer accept the old ambiguity. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, forging a trilateral security pact explicitly built around collective deterrence. Baghdad, for now, remains an observer to that architecture rather than a participant. Whether Iraq eventually earns a seat at that table, or squanders it, may depend less on September 30 than on what al-Zaidi’s government is still willing to risk after it.
- The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.