Government says 275,000 of a promised million housing plots are ready

BAGHDAD — Procedures have been completed for 275,000 residential plots under the Watan Initiative, a little over a quarter of the million the government has promised across federal Iraq, the prime minister’s office said, with registration for citizens due to open next month.

The initiative covers 121 cities in 15 governorates, said Ihsan al-Awadi, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who heads the project’s steering committee. The prepared plots are ready for development, contracting has begun for their infrastructure, and “the foundation stone for the first governorate will be laid in the coming days,” he said after a meeting of the project’s high committee chaired by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi.

Zaidi told the Justice Ministry to speed up a database of state-owned and other property to hasten allocation and the transfer of ownership, and ordered plots distributed by place of residence at governorate and district level, prioritising eligible and low-income families. The registration link should open “as soon as possible during the coming month,” his office said. It gave no timeline for the full million.

The state’s property records have been a weak point. Courts and the Federal Commission of Integrity have uncovered more than a dozen cases of forged or manipulated land registrations in two months, including three involving Nasiriyah municipal land and a network led by a registry director in Babil that hid more than 170 properties.

The Deputy Planning Minister said this week that population growth alone requires about 200,000 new homes a year. Zaidi ordered earlier this month that a new city of 10,000 to 15,000 dunams, 2,500 to 3,750 hectares, be built in each governorate, carrying its name. The Kurdistan Region is not part of the initiative.