Weapons policy does not target the PMF, security spokesperson says

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s policy of restricting weapons to state control applies to armed groups operating outside the security institutions and not to the Popular Mobilization Forces, which are part of the armed forces, Security Media Cell chief Saad Maan said Saturday.

“The Popular Mobilization Forces are part of the Iraqi armed forces, and their members are subject to the military laws in force,” Maan told the Iraqi News Agency. The policy “targets entities outside the framework of the security institutions,” he said, and is meant to ensure “there is no parallel command or other command that uses weapons outside the framework of the state.”

The distinction is not straightforward. All six factions on either side of the disarmament question operate as PMF brigades. Saraya al-Salam, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and the Imam Ali Battalions have moved to comply; Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada have refused. A government committee is separately weighing proposals to break up PMF units formed around individual factions, redistributing fighters between brigades and putting army officers into the command structure.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s government set up the weapons-control committee in June to draw up binding procedures for withdrawing weapons and ending political affiliations within the security forces, with representatives from the army, the interior and defense ministries and the PMF. He has set Sept. 30, when the U.S.-led coalition mission ends, as the date for bringing all weapons under state control. “After Sept. 30, there is no need for any faction,” he said at the White House on July 14. “Factions are a need, not a profession. There is no justification for their existence after Sept. 30.”

The PMF was formed in 2014 after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for volunteers to fight the Islamic State group after it seized Mosul, and parliament recognized it in 2016 as part of Iraq’s security