Ministers, MPs and security agencies used Starlink before it was licensed, minister says

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s national security service, its intelligence agency, government ministers and members of parliament were all subscribing to Starlink while the service was operating illegally in the country, the communications minister said, with 42,000 unlicensed terminals in use.

“Starlink has become a fait accompli, and there are 42,000 units inside the country illegally, and people are subscribed to them,” Mustafa Sanad said in an interview with Laith al-Jazairi monitored by 964media. “National security, intelligence, ministers and MPs are all subscribed to Starlink. The commission then issued them a licence and set conditions on blocking and compliance with the regulations.”

Sanad said he objected to the licence and signed only because the government wanted to support the company and the Communications and Media Commission pushed for it. “In the end it was signed, and I had reservations about this signing, and we differed over pricing policy,” he said, adding that Starlink pays 8% to the commission and nothing to his ministry. Iraq lost 3 trillion dinars, about $2.3 billion, on cable infrastructure, he said.

His central objection is that Starlink has no ground station in Iraq. The satellite “reflects the data to Qatar and then to Iraq, and here is the core of our dispute,” he said, because a satellite needs a ground station and Iraq has none. Negotiators asked the company to build one; it declined for now and proposed waiting two years while it assessed the market, he said.

Sanad said he intends to compete rather than accept the position, having raised speeds 20% before Starlink’s arrival and introduced fibre packages from 300 to 800 Mbps at the same price and without a $500 terminal. “I have complete confidence that we will defeat Starlink in competition,” he said. He put Starlink’s global subscriber base at 12 million against 2 million on Iraq’s fibre network.

The account differs from the one the regulator gave when the service launched on July 29. Baligh Abu Kalal, head of the commission’s executive authority, said Iraq would take 9% of Starlink’s revenue plus a 15% profit tax, that the licence carried a security annex involving the prime minister’s office, the intelligence service, the National Security Service and the National Cybersecurity Center, and that authorities could identify and monitor connected devices through an application programming interface, with local users managed through an Iraqi region. He put the number of pre-launch users at about 200,000 on some 40,000 terminals.

Until the licence took effect, authorities treated the terminals as unlicensed equipment under the 2004 telecommunications law, and customs seized 24 devices at Baghdad International Airport on June 1. Then-Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani met SpaceX delegations in May and December 2025. The licence was signed in Iraq and presented at a ceremony in Washington on July 17 during Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s visit, among the arrangements announced during the trip when Iraqi agencies and companies signed 48 agreements with U.S. companies.