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Iraq’s government is pressing ahead with a plan to collect an estimated 6 million weapons held outside official institutions, the Interior Ministry said, even as Baghdad quietly retreated from a September 30 deadline that had been set for armed factions to surrender their arsenals.
Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Hussein al-Awadi said the government was treating 30 September — originally set as a hard deadline for factions to hand over weapons, timed to coincide with the final withdrawal of US-led coalition forces — as the start of a regulatory process rather than a completion point.
A four-member committee including Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and former Premier Mohammed Shia al-Sudani is working on a revised mechanism.
Al-Awadi was speaking during a visit to Salah al-Din province, where he said the government had shifted focus from combating terrorism to tackling organised crime, and that security files would be handed to provinces one by one in coming months.
He said the ministry had made measurable progress in roughly 100 days since al-Zaidi took office.
The disarmament push is being conducted through negotiation rather than force. Al-Zaidi said in August his government had no intention of using military means against the factions, and that some had already handed over weapons while talks continued with others.
In recent days he said the US troop withdrawal would leave “no justification or need for any resistance in Iraq” and that he would not accept “a state within the state”.
Tehran-backed militias at the centre
The campaign is running under significant US pressure. Washington asked Baghdad in June for a clear timetable for bringing weapons under state control, and the Trump administration has linked compliance to Iraq’s access to dollar flows critical to its economy.
The factions at the centre of the standoff are mostly Shia militias that formed under Iranian guidance and operate with Tehran’s backing.
They are loosely grouped under the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), an umbrella organisation established in 2014 after Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued an order calling on volunteers to fight the so-called Islamic State group.
Some factions within the PMF have been formally incorporated into Iraq’s state security structure, while others have maintained independent command chains and continued to receive weapons, funding and direction from Iran’s IRGC.
Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba — two of the most hardline Tehran-aligned groups, both of which have previously targeted US forces in Iraq and launched attacks on Gulf states during the ongoing Iran war — have refused to hand over what they describe as “resistance weapons”.
By contrast, Saraya al-Salam, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali have reached an understanding with the government to surrender weapons or regularise their status.
Saraya al-Salam formally separated from cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement and was integrated into the Iraqi security forces in a ceremony in Samarra in June.
Al-Zaidi, a 40-year-old billionaire businessman with no prior political or government experience, was approved as prime minister by parliament on 14 May as a compromise candidate following months of deadlock within the Shiite Coordination Framework.
Restricting weapons to state control was a central commitment of his government programme.