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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran is ready to help Iraq confine weapons outside state control, Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani said Wednesday citing Iranian officials as informing him, as a September deadline for armed groups - including those aligned with Tehran - to disarm looms.
"'Iranian officials said, ‘Convey this message to the [Iraqi] Prime Minister [Ali al-Zaidi]: We are ready to help Mr. Zaidi in this matter,’” the Kurdish President said in an interview with the private-owned Iraqi satellite channel, al-Sharqiya TV, adding that the Iranian figures had reiterated this "official stance" to him on behalf of Tehran on two separate occasions.
“They [Iranian officials] emphasized that I should pass this message on to Mr. al-Zaidi,” President Barzani added, further quoting them as stating, “If he [Zaidi] wants help from a neighboring country, we [Iran] are ready to provide it.”
In his inaugural address before the Iraqi parliament in mid-May, Prime Minister al-Zaidi vowed security reform, including "confining weapons under state control," and in early June he ordered the formation of a committee to oversee the disengagement of political parties and armed factions from the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
The PMF was established in 2014 amid the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, which saw large parts of the country's north and west seized by the group.
Created in response to a religious edict issued by Iraq's highest Shiite authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the PMF was initially an umbrella organization of roughly 70 predominantly Shiite armed groups, with some 250,000 members.
Though a state-funded institution, the PMF comprises factions aligned with the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance,’ with the core overlap including the Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Kata'ib Hezbollah, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, and Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada armed groups.
While some factions have expressed willingness to comply with Zaidi's push, others have cited the continued presence of foreign forces - namely those of the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS - as justification for refusing to comply.
Moreover, the remarks by Iranian officials come at a time when the same groups included in the disarmament plan - operating under the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) umbrella - said in early April that they had carried out more than 750 attacks on alleged US-linked assets in Iraq and the region since the outbreak of the Iran war in late February, as part of Tehran's response.
Zaidi's spokesperson, Sabah al-Numan, told Rudaw in mid-July that a September 30 deadline set by the premier to bring Iraqi armed groups' weapons under state control is "fixed and irreversible."
Most recently, the Iraqi premier on Tuesday directed the federal parliament's Security and Defense Committee to draft a law confining weapons to the hands of the state, aiming to consolidate control over armed factions amid heightened regional military tensions and an upcoming US-led coalition withdrawal.
The committee, in turn, vowed support for the al-Zaidi government's measures to strengthen state security and military institutions.
