Ministry of Interior: Ready to purchase “mortars and PKC” from Iraqis

Baghdad – The head of the National Committee for the Regulation of Arms presented details of an ambitious government project to collect widely spread firearms in the country and explained the regulations for registering light arms, which will allow licensing of one piece per household, while the government will only purchase medium weapons such as PKC and Dushka, and heavy weapons like “mortars” if found.

Brigadier Mansour Ali Sultan said in an interview with local media:

The committee was formed in accordance with the government’s program, and part of our work involves regulating arms, organizing the database, and preparing short, medium, and long-term strategic policies.

We are now in the first phase, which started on January 1, 2024, and will end on December 31, 2024. This period includes the registration of citizens’ weapons, which will be away from bureaucracy and through an electronic mechanism.

We are working on two parallel lines; the first is weapon registration, where the weapon owned by a person in his home will be formally registered, provided that the owner is Iraqi, over 25 years old, and according to the national policy, every head of a household in an independent home has the right to own one weapon. The second line is the weapon purchase line, and there is talk that the allocated amount ($10 million) is somewhat modest, but it may represent a qualitative leap currently.

Each police command in every province received one billion dinars, totaling 15 billion dinars, provided from the emergency funds of the Council of Ministers. The amounts proposed are initial to encourage citizens to sell their weapons, especially medium weapons, and it should be noted that the state will only register light weapons, whether a rifle or a pistol. Medium and heavy weapons will not be registered but are completely prohibited and criminalized.

We are in an organizational phase, including purchasing and registering weapons, but we will never buy pistols and rifles; instead, we register them according to regulations, and we will buy medium weapons like (PKC, RPK, PKT, Dushka), and heavy weapons like (mortars, cannons, and RPGs). We are now working as a complete system and not just as police.

Our campaign today also includes organizing gun sale campaigns, and I believe the public has noticed how the shops were closed, as the campaign also targets online sites that promote gun sales, where we monitored 385 websites promoting gun sales and dealt with them.

The quantities we dealt with have started to increase, as the weapons seized reached 25 tons of weapons that were controlled, confiscated, and legal actions were taken against their owners.