State of Law warns of dangerous showdown with Iraqi armed factions

Shafaq News – Baghdad

The State of Law Coalition, led by former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, warned on Sunday against escalating tensions between the government and armed factions.

The warning follows Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s acknowledgment of “flaws” within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — an umbrella organization of Shiite groups formed in 2014 to fight ISIS — after armed confrontations between PMF fighters and security forces at the Agriculture Directorate in Baghdad. Al-Sudani has ordered a review of PMF unit deployments, leadership qualifications, and compliance with regulations through a high-level ministerial and security committee.

Coalition figure Hussein al-Maliki told Shafaq News that while the law “must apply to all,” the government’s latest steps — including an investigative committee’s findings on the Agriculture Directorate incident and the dismissal of two Kataib Hezbollah brigade commanders — amounted to escalation. He linked the moves to recent remarks by the British ambassador on dissolving the PMF, and what he described as a US veto on passing the PMF Authority Law.

“These issues should be resolved politically,” he said, warning that external actors were trying to push the government into confrontation with “resistance factions” in a way that could ignite a Shiite–Shiite conflict. Such a crisis, he argued, could derail the electoral process, push Iraq toward chaos, and even lead to an emergency government or a return to UN Security Council oversight under Chapter VII.

Al-Maliki urged holding individuals accountable without naming their factions, saying that repeated public identification and the insistence on restricting weapons — without passing the PMF law — could give the impression the government was acting on foreign instructions, undermining public trust.