Shafaaq News

Iraq's farmers fed the state. Now they're waiting to be paid.

Tue, 12 May 2026 09:42:24 +0000

Shafaq News

When Abu Ali delivered his wheatharvest to government warehouses in Najaf province this season, he receivedwhat the Iraqi state offers every farmer who completes the handover: anofficial receipt confirming the transaction.

Weeks passed, and his visits to therelevant authorities produced a familiar rotation of deferral — "come backnext week," "the file is under review." To cover the costs ofthe new agricultural season, he sold his wife's gold jewelry. "We workedthe land for a full year," he told Shafaq News. "Plowing, irrigation,heat, cold, all just to reach a harvest that would cover our debts."

Abu Ali's situation is theprevailing condition of Iraq's wheat and barley farmers this harvest season,and it points to a contradiction at the heart of the country's agriculturalpolicy: a state that depends on domestically grown wheat to manage its foodsecurity cannot —or will not— pay the farmers who grow it on time.

Strategic Crop And Unpaid Bill

Iraq designates wheat as a strategiccommodity. The government purchases it at subsidized prices, maintains anational stockpile, and uses it to stabilize flour prices for a population ofmore than 42 million. The procurement system, in theory, is a pillar of thecountry's food framework.

In practice, the system functions bytransferring financial risk downward. Farmers deliver their crop, receivedocumentation, and then wait, sometimes for months, while their payment movesthrough layers of administrative review, budget allocation, and ministerialapproval. During that waiting period, they still owe their suppliers, laborers,and equipment creditors.

Mahdi Dhamed Al-Qaisi, an adviser toIraq's Ministry of Agriculture, acknowledged the problem without ambiguity."Farmers' dues are like a government employee's salary," he toldShafaq News. "If it is delayed, they are harmed." He confirmed thatthe government has issued directives following official meetings with theFederation of Farmers' Associations, and that the Cabinet has passedresolutions designating these payments as a disbursement priority.

The gap between Cabinet resolutionand farmer payment is where the crisis lives.

Protests Across The Grain Belt

In recent weeks, farmers from Najaf,Karbala, al-Diwaniyah, and Babil —provinces that form the core of Iraq'scentral grain-producing belt— traveled to Baghdad to demonstrate publicly.Their demands went beyond overdue payments, calling for upward revision of theofficial wheat purchase price, the elimination of certain marketing proceduresthey regard as obstacles, and compensation for crop losses caused by floodingand drought.

Some of those protests werereportedly dispersed by force. The government subsequently openedinvestigations and issued instructions to follow up on the farmers' demands.This sequence suggests official recognition of the pressure, if not yet aresolution of its causes.

The protests matter as evidence ofscale, because when farmers from four provinces organize coordinateddemonstrations in the capital, the problem has moved well beyond seasonaladministrative friction and into the terrain of a political file that Baghdadcan no longer defer.

Structural Mismatch, NotBureaucratic Accident

Parliament is beginning to frame itin those terms. Lawmaker of Khadamat bloc, Uday Al-Zamil, who has followed theagricultural file closely, told Shafaq News that farmers represent "thefundamental pillar of the economy" but face what he described as thesystematic undervaluing of their rights. "The state does not cooperatewith the farmer as it should…even though he is the foundation of domesticmarket activity."

Al-Zamil situates the payment crisiswithin a longer arc of agricultural decline. Iraq was once a significantproducer of dates, vegetable oils, and cotton. Those sectors contracted overdecades as import dependency expanded, a pattern familiar across rentiereconomies where oil revenues (about 90%) make domestic production feel optionaluntil a crisis makes it urgent. Wheat held on as a strategic exception,shielded by government purchase guarantees. But those guarantees are only asreliable as the budget that backs them.

And that is precisely the problem.Al-Zamil identifies the causes of delay as the country's broader fiscalpressures, the chronic lateness of annual budget approval, and theadministrative complexity of Iraq's procurement verification and disbursementmechanisms. None of these causes is new, nor have they been structurallyresolved.

Cost Of Delayed Payment Compounds

For Iraqi farmers, harvest revenuesare operating capital for the following season. Seed, fertilizer, labor,irrigation, transport, and equipment maintenance must all be financed beforethe next crop can be planted. When the state delays payment, farmers borrow tocover these costs, typically at higher rates and with greater personal exposurethan if they had been paid on schedule.

The Ministry of Agriculture adviserconfirmed that production input costs —seeds, fertilizers, energy, transport—have risen significantly in recent seasons, while farmers argue that officialpurchase prices have not kept pace with actual operating expenditures. Evenwhen the price is technically adequate, delay erodes its real value: a farmerwho borrows at interest to cover the gap between delivery and payment receivesless, in effective terms, than the stated price suggests.

Delayed payment forces borrowing,borrowing raises the cost of the following season, higher costs narrow margins,and narrower margins quietly erode the incentive to plant —until the supply thestate depends on to manage food prices begins to thin from the bottom up. Thefarmer, in this arrangement, functions as an involuntary short-term creditor tothe state's food security policy, absorbing the liquidity risk that thegovernment cannot or does not manage itself.

Harvest Is Strategic, Payment IsOptional

What the wheat payment crisisultimately reveals is a misalignment between Iraq's food security rhetoric andits fiscal framework. At the level of official statement, wheat isirreplaceable and non-negotiable because it is considered a strategic, sovereignissue. but at the level of budget execution, payments to the farmers whoproduce it are treated as a residual claim, disbursed when liquidity allowsrather than when obligation falls due.

This misalignment is familiar acrossthe Middle East and North Africa, where countries that rely on subsidizeddomestic procurement to manage food prices frequently struggle with the workingcapital demands of that system, particularly when oil revenues contract orbudget cycles slip. But Iraq's version of this tension carries specific weight:the country imports a substantial share of its food requirements, and thedomestic wheat sector represents one of the few agricultural activities thegovernment has explicitly committed to sustaining.

If payment delays become structuralso that farmers cannot reliably count on timely disbursement, the rationalresponse is to reduce exposure to the system. Plant Less. Sell Informally.Exit. The government's food security calculus depends on farmers not makingthat calculation. But every delayed payment makes it more tempting.

Al-Qaisi insists the government ismoving to address the backlog and that wheat procurement will continue atsupported prices. The Cabinet resolutions are real. The political attention,following the protests, is genuine. But resolutions and intentions haveappeared before, and the harvest season arrives every year regardless.

The farmers of Najaf, Karbala, andal-Diwaniyah are presenting a receipt. That it has gone unanswered for weeks,with debts mounting and a new season already pressing, says more about thestate's priorities than any policy document could.

Written and edited by Shafaq Newsstaff.

Iraq's universities selling degrees and buying research: No one held accountable

Sun, 10 May 2026 15:40:11 +0000

Shafaq News

Iraq's higher education system is contending with anexpanding market for purchased academic research and fraudulent degrees, withdisciplinary measures proving insufficient to reverse a pattern that academicswarn is eroding the credibility of the country's universities.

Papers for Sale

The purchase of academic research in Iraq hasdeveloped into a structured parallel market operating in proximity touniversity campuses and across online platforms. Bookshops near universities,unlicensed offices, and social media pages now openly offer researchpreparation services at prices that vary by academic level.

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE) 2024 Annual Report on Research Integrity Violations, the cost of abachelor's graduation paper ranges between 75,000 and 100,000 Iraqi dinars($58–$77), while master's theses can reach between 3 million and 7 milliondinars ($2,300–$5,400) depending on specialization. The report identifies Iraqamong several countries where such markets have moved from isolated incidentsto structured operations.

Beyond original writing, these services also recycleexisting research or modify titles to circumvent detection, a practice thatfacilitates both direct and indirect academic plagiarism. A former worker inone such operation, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fear ofprofessional reprisal, told Shafaq News that research papers are frequentlywritten by experienced individuals in exchange for a share of the profits, thensuperficially altered to fit the commissioning student.

Detection tools, including Turnitin and iThenticate,are in use across Iraqi universities, but their effectiveness has beencomplicated by the increasing sophistication of AI-assisted text generation,which produces output that standard similarity-detection systems struggle toflag.

Academic Decay

The problem is not confined to students. Universityprofessor Alaa Najah, a faculty member at a Baghdad-area institution, toldShafaq News that the phenomenon has extended to some lecturers, who reuse orpurchase research outright to meet promotion requirements. He warned that thedeeper consequence is the production of non-authentic knowledge and falsifiedresearch results, a trajectory that risks graduating generations holdingcertificates without real competence, with downstream effects on state institutionsand the labor market.

Academic professor Khalid Al-Ardawi, a specialist inhigher education governance, described scientific plagiarism as a global ratherthan Iraq-specific problem but stressed that its expansion within Iraqiinstitutions without sufficient deterrence is what distinguishes the localsituation.

“The more plagiarism spreads without accountability,the more academic institutions lose credibility, research becomes suspect, anduniversity rankings suffer.” He linked the phenomenon to weak academicpreparation, declining professional ethics, insufficient oversight, and asystemic prioritization of output quantity over research quality.

Data from the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education andScientific Research (MOHESR) shows that more than 27,000 academic certificatesissued abroad were subjected to verification review —a process launchedfollowing a pattern of irregularities identified by the ministry. Hundreds werefound to lack basic academic requirements.

Investigations reported by Al Arabiya found thatpostgraduate degrees, including master's and doctoral qualifications, were insome cases obtained through intermediaries for payments ranging between $5,000and $10,000, with degree holders found to have neither attended courses norcompleted verifiable research. Some qualifications were completed in unusuallyshort periods or without formal academic supervision. The ministry subsequentlysuspended recognition of several foreign institutions and launched large-scaleverification procedures.

Zero Accountability

Shafaq News contacted MOHESR for comment on thepurchase of academic research, its growing prevalence, measures taken toaddress it, and possible solutions. No response had been received at the timeof publication.

The ministry has previously outlined disciplinaryresponses to confirmed plagiarism cases, including transferring lecturers toadministrative positions, suspending university allowances, revoking academicdegrees, and forming investigative committees. It has also documented cases inwhich plagiarism was detected after thesis defense, resulting in degreewithdrawal.

A separate case at the University of Dhi Qar —a publicinstitution in southern Iraq— involved two lecturers found to have plagiarizedand published a single study across multiple journals, using it to secureacademic promotion and a position within the university administration.

Academic professor Safwan Qusay, an advisor on highereducation policy, told Shafaq News that disciplinary action alone isinsufficient. He argued that some researchers turn to purchased studies becauseof “the weak oversight of scientific journals and unrealistic researchtimelines tied to promotion cycles.”

"Investigation results must be made public,…Thosefound guilty of scientific fraud should have their academic titles revoked, anddegrees must be withdrawn the moment unattributed material is identified."

Academic advisor Mohammed Al-Rubaie described theinformal academic market as an open presence in some university environments,warning that continued neglect risks turning universities into institutionsfocused on issuing credentials rather than producing knowledge.

The Ranking Mirage

Iraqi universities have expanded their presence inglobal rankings, appearing in frameworks including the QS World UniversityRankings —which assesses institutions on research output, academic reputation,and employer recognition— the CWTS Leiden Ranking, which measures the qualityand impact of scientific publications, and the SCImago Institutions Rankings, aclassification system based on research performance, innovation, and societalimpact. More than 21 Iraqi universities have appeared in the Leiden Ranking,and dozens have been included in Times Higher Education assessments.

This international visibility, however, existsalongside structural conditions that complicate its interpretation. Data fromScopus, an internationally recognized database that indexes peer-reviewedresearch output, indicates that Iraq produces between approximately 6,000 and10,000 scientific papers annually, a range that reflects year-on-yearfluctuation between 2020 and 2024 rather than a methodological estimate. Thatfigure is equivalent to between 16 and 27 papers per day.

SCImago data places Iraq between 60th and 70thglobally in total research output, and among mid-tier contributors within theArab region, behind Saudi Arabia and Egypt in both volume and internationalcitation impact.

A significant portion of that output, according toSCImago journal classifications, is published in Q3 and Q4 quartile journals—categories associated with lower citation influence and less rigorouspeer-review standards— raising questions about whether ranking visibilityreflects genuine research quality or sustained publication pressure within apromotion-driven system.

MOHESR's current verification procedures forforeign-issued degrees remain ongoing, according to the ministry's most recentpublic statement on the matter. No legislative measure specifically targetingthe purchase of domestic academic research had been formally introduced at thetime of publication.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Opinion: Nechirvan Barzani walks through Baghdad’s political minefield

Sun, 10 May 2026 12:36:47 +0000

Shafaq News

By Ali Hussein Feyli

Crises in politics are not always resolved throughforce or shifting balances of power, but often begin when rivals cease viewingone another as enemies to be excluded and instead recognize the possibility ofunderstanding, opening a path that the language of conflict itself could neverreach.

In this context, the recent meetings held on May 4 and5 by Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani can be seen as an effort toreshape relations between Baghdad and Erbil, reflecting not merely diplomaticengagement but a broader attempt to move from zero-sum confrontation towardpractical consensus at a time of mounting financial pressures, rising populism,and shrinking public space in both the Region and the Iraqi capital, with theinitiative signaling a search for realistic solutions to long-standing disputesaway from the easy rhetoric of escalation.

For years, a conviction prevailed among some politicalactors that Baghdad responds only to the pressure of power balances. Such areading is rooted in historical experiences where the logic of force oftenprevailed over the rule of law, yet major transformations, particularly duringcritical periods, are frequently shaped in the space between public emotion andpolitical rationality. While the former mobilizes the street, the latterremains more capable of protecting the state and ensuring its continuity.

From this perspective, the Kurdistan RegionPresidency’s adoption of a calm institutional discourse appears to represent anattempt to shift from emotional demands toward a realistic management ofconstitutional rights. This transformation is not without challenges,particularly in a political environment accustomed to sharp rhetoric, wherede-escalation may be perceived as retreat or weakness, even though it may infact reflect a more pragmatic reading of the balance of power. Such pragmatismis especially urgent for a people like the Kurds, who have spent more than acentury caught in cycles of war, identity struggles, and the search forguarantees.

Historical experiences offer important examples inthis regard. The path of Nelson Mandela in South Africa demonstrated thatpreserving stability may require moving beyond the language of revenge in favorof coexistence. In modern Kurdish history, the general amnesty declared afterthe 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime stands out as one ofthe clearest examples of overcoming political hatred. The decision taken by theleadership of the Kurdistan Front –a coalition of Kurdish parties establishedin 1987-1988 in Iraq– led by the late Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani, wasnot merely an administrative measure, but a historic turning point that helpedprevent a wide cycle of retaliation and made tolerance the foundation forbuilding a new political entity rather than turning memory into fuel forendless conflict.

Today, Nechirvan Barzani represents, within thisequation, a model of measured diplomacy. Rather than appearing through thelanguage of threats and elevated nationalist slogans, he opts for the languageof shared interests, constitutional frameworks, and gradual understandings.Although this model faces considerable obstacles within Kurdistan due to theweight of a bloody history and the growing influence of populism, it is naturalthat part of Kurdish society may view such diplomatic language as a form of retreator inadequacy.

Yet amid the rubble of missed opportunities, NechirvanBarzani remains, in his characteristic manner, focused on conveying animportant message to the younger generation: the most difficult test is notalways fighting wars, but building peace and preventing collapse.

History rarely lingers on those who hurled thegreatest number of insults at their opponents, but rather on those whosucceeded in extracting peace from the heart of hostility. What NechirvanBarzani is doing in Baghdad and regional capitals resembles the work of anarchitect building in a minefield, preoccupied with preserving a politicalentity called the Kurdistan Region. Such an undertaking requires a kind ofcourage unafraid of being accused of weakness.

Despite the rise of extremism and emotional politics,the course of history appears to be moving toward the model championed byNechirvan Barzani and those who share this approach: a transition from theequation of imposing one’s will toward strategic integration, in a way thatcould make the Kurdistan Region a more stable entity within Iraq amid anongoing struggle shaped by questions of existence and identity.

This article was originally written in Arabic.

Southern Lebanon counts a second toll beyond the dead: LANDS

Sat, 09 May 2026 19:35:14 +0000

Shafaq News

While displaced residents watch Israel raze their land from afar, the Lebanese government warns that environmental damage in the South could take decades to reverse, if ever.

Abu Mahmoud Hijazi, 84, never went home. Forced from Aitaroun, a border village in southern Lebanon that Israeli strikes reduced almost entirely to rubble, he spent his final months in displacement following his land's destruction through his phone.

Images arrived daily from neighbors who remained or others passing through: olive trees he had planted in his youth now blackened, if they still stood at all, and fields he had once cultivated reduced to scorched earth. "Every day, I watch it disappear, piece by piece," he told Shafaq News, holding on to a single condition for return —that something, anything, remained. He died before that condition could be met.

His death is one of the casualties that figures do not capture. Lebanon's Health Ministry reported that Israeli strikes since March 2, 2026, have killed at least 2,795 people and injured 8,586. But beyond the mounting human toll, another loss is taking shape across the South, less visible, but potentially more enduring.

Ecocide

On April 23, Lebanon's Environment Ministry, in a report prepared jointly with the National Council for Scientific Research, described the environmental impact of the strikes as "ecocide." The report documented the loss of around 5,000 hectares of forest and more than 2,100 hectares of orchards —among them the olive and citrus groves that have defined southern Lebanon's agricultural identity for generations— and warned that damage to soil, water, and air quality carries long-term consequences for public health, food security, and livelihoods.

In southern Lebanon, where agriculture underpins economic life, those risks are immediate. A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) assessment found that farming, a primary source of income in the region, has been severely disrupted by bombardment and displacement. Crops have been destroyed, livestock lost, and large areas of farmland rendered unsafe, while pollution from munitions and explosive remnants has reduced soil productivity and compromised water sources relied on for both irrigation and daily use.

Contamination and Long-Term Soil Damage

A 2026 study conducted jointly by the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University detected elevated levels of heavy metals, including cadmium and nickel, exceeding health safety thresholds in soil samples taken from bombed areas. Cadmium and nickel are toxic to humans at sustained exposure levels and can accumulate in crops grown in contaminated soil, entering the food chain over time.

The study also identified phosphorus residues consistent with the Israeli use of white phosphorus munitions, with concentrations in some locations reaching 1,858 parts per million, significantly above the threshold of 50 parts per million considered safe for agricultural soil under international environmental standards. Researchers warned that such substances can persist in soil for years, posing risks through prolonged environmental exposure.

Other contaminants have compounded the damage. In February, Lebanon's Environment and Agriculture Ministries reported the presence of glyphosate —a herbicide the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as "probably carcinogenic to humans," meaning evidence of cancer risk exists in both animal studies and human exposure data— at concentrations 20 to 30 times higher than typical agricultural use levels. The ministries warned that such concentrations risk further degrading soil conditions, damaging vegetation, and threatening already strained water resources.

The ongoing bombardment and use of incendiary munitions have also degraded forests and rangelands, polluted water bodies, and reduced air quality across affected areas, the UNDP warned. Unexploded munitions and residual contamination continue to limit safe access to land, complicating any return to farming and requiring extensive rehabilitation and reforestation efforts.

A Question of Return

The cumulative effect is damage that outpaces recovery. Burned fields can be replanted, but degraded soil and polluted water operate on a different timescale entirely, one that Lebanon's Environment Ministry warns could stretch across decades, and in the most severely affected areas, may never reach full restoration.

For the displaced, this shifts the question of return. It is no longer only about when they can go back, but whether the land they depend on will still be able to sustain them.

Abu Mahmoud Hijazi died without an answer. The photographs he received each day in displacement —his blackened olive trees, his scorched fields, his village of Aitaroun in ruins— were the last record he kept of a place he never saw again.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Force without a finish line: Iran is losing the war, the US is losing the endgame

Fri, 08 May 2026 10:55:21 +0000

Shafaq News

PresidentDonald Trump launched a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, andnine weeks later, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could not enterIran to verify whether the nuclear program still exists. The inspectors wereblocked from the sites where the bombs were supposed to destroy the program.Washington is currently blockading a country whose nuclear status it cannotconfirm— while negotiating a deal premised on dismantling a program it cannotsee.

Two sidesare now blockading each other in the same strait, with the US Navy preventingships from entering or leaving Iranian ports, and Iran restricting commercialtraffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of the world's oil supply is caughtbetween them. Washington launched "Project Freedom" —a militaryoperation to escort stranded ships through the strait— then suspended it within48 hours, citing progress toward a deal with Tehran, while maintaining itsblockade of Iranian ports. Trump announced the pause based on "therequest" of Pakistan and other countries and "the fact that GreatProgress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement" with Iran.Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reaffirmed that navigation in the Straitof Hormuz would return to normal if the war is permanently resolved, themaritime blockade is lifted, and sanctions imposed on Iran are removed.

Threepillars held the strategy together: economic pressure to change Iran'sbehavior, controlled escalation to manage the cost of confrontation, and Gulfstate alignment to provide regional legitimacy and strategic depth. What thepast nine weeks revealed is that each pillar, by its own logic, destroyed theconditions the next one needed to function —the pressure radicalized Tehranenough to justify escalation, the escalation exhausted the Gulf states, and theGulf fracture removed the regional legitimacy needed to convert militaryadvantage into a negotiated settlement.

Pain WithoutSurrender

The economiccampaign against Iran produced numbers that, read in isolation, resemblesuccess. Iran's GDP contracted from around $600 billion in 2010 to an estimated$356 billion in 2025, with per capita income falling from $8,000 to $5,000 overthe same period, according to World Bank data.

By March2025, the rial had passed one million to the dollar —the least valuablecurrency in the world— with inflation exceeding 48% by October 2025, andbetween 22 and 50% of Iranians estimated to be living below the poverty line.Food inflation reached 105% by February 2026, and the IMF projects a furthercontraction of 6.1% across 2026.

Politicalanalyst Mujashaa al-Tamimi, speaking to Shafaq News, identified what thepressure campaign was actually calibrated to do: keep both sides short ofconfrontation by making the cost of escalation visible and mutual, managing aconflict through economic tools, cyberattacks, and proxy pressure rather thanresolving it. A campaign calibrated to stop short of war is, by the same logic,calibrated to stop short of resolution —producing suffering without surrenderon the question that mattered most.

The ceilingwas nowhere more visible than on the nuclear file. Despite years of sanctions,Tehran stabilized oil exports at roughly 1.5 million barrels per day through acovert black-market network routing oil to China via ship-to-ship transfers ingrey zones near Malaysia. The sanctions degraded Iran's revenue withoutsevering it, and on the central demand —enrichment— Iran never moved.

Beforedeparting for talks in Rome, Foreign Minister Araghchi posted his government'sposition publicly: "Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science:Zero nuclear weapons = we DO have a deal. Zero enrichment = we do NOT have adeal." The line had not shifted across five rounds of talks, a twelve-daywar, and maximum pressure sanctions —which meant that when the pressurecampaign exhausted its tools short of its objective, war presented itself asthe sequence's next instrument rather than its alternative.

Logic ThatRan Past Its Limits

Al-Tamimiwarned that the real danger in managed confrontation is not the toolsthemselves but the moment miscalculation converts a limited exchange intosomething neither side chose. “That moment came not as a single event but as asequence in which each step made the next harder to avoid.”

Five roundsof nuclear talks between April and June 2025 were halted on the eve of aplanned sixth round when Israel launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities,with both sides subsequently signaling willingness to resume negotiations whiletaking no practical step toward doing so. The US-Israeli strikes on Fordow,Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025, the February 2026 campaign that killedSupreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran's closure of Hormuz —each decision waspresented as discrete, and together they form the terminal logic of a pressurestrategy that ran out of gradations between coercion and war.

Mahdi Azizi,director of the New Vision Center for Studies and Media in Tehran, told ShafaqNews that the United States had concluded that toppling the Iranian regime was“beyond reach” given the “cohesion of its leadership” and the difficulty of itsgeography, shifting the objective from regime change to attrition, degradingcapabilities, shrinking economic space, raising costs across every domainwithout a defined endpoint. Attrition sustained indefinitely does not producesurrender; it adapts, and Iran's adaptation took forms the strategy had notpriced.

Iran's proxynetwork had already entered structural degradation before the war began, withBashar al-Assad's fall in December 2024 severing the Syrian land corridor toLebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah killed, and Iraqi factions fracturingover their posture toward Washington. Rather than collapsing, the proxiesadapted —reports emerged, which Tehran denied, of Iraqi armed faction membersbeing deployed inside Iran to help suppress the 2025–26 protests.

The CarnegieEndowment noted that US officials engaged in "verbal gymnastics" toexplain how a program they had just "obliterated" also presented animminent threat. The IAEA has been unable to resume inspections at sites struckduring the June 2025 conflict and has not verified the extent of damage toIran's nuclear infrastructure, meaning the war's primary objective cannot beconfirmed as achieved by the only institution authorized to make thatdetermination.

The PriceWashington Paid

The costs ofthe US strategy are concrete, measurable, and in some cases are still beingcounted. Thirteen American service members were killed, and approximately 373were wounded in the weeks following the February 28 strikes, with most woundedhaving returned to duty, but five remaining seriously injured as of earlyApril. The Pentagon's own accounting of those figures has been disputed.

The WarDepartment altered its tally of American casualties by scrubbing 15wounded-in-action troops from the count without public explanation, promptingone US government official to describe the practice as a "casualtycover-up."

Theequipment losses tell a parallel story. Iran's missiles and drones, and oneinstance of friendly fire, destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3billion and $2.8 billion, according to the first detailed tabulation by theCenter for Strategic and International Studies —a figure that does not includelosses incurred at US bases across the Gulf region or specialized naval assets.

Among themost significant losses: at least one THAAD missile defense radar, with somereports suggesting two were destroyed, at a combined cost of between $485million and $970 million, and three F-15 jets shot down in a friendly fireincident in Kuwait in early March.

The dayafter War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that "never in recorded historyhas a nation's military been so quickly and so effectively neutralized,"Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, woundingseveral soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700million.

Beyond theequipment, the war exposed the structural vulnerability of the US military'sregional posture. With bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, andthe UAE all targeted, troops were transferred to hotels and office buildings asconventional bases became too exposed.

Front ThatWas Never There

Hazem Ayyad,professor of political science at the University of Amman, stated to ShafaqNews that the weight of regional forces —popular sentiment, economic exposure,institutional pressure— tilts decisively against full-scale war and towardde-escalation. Gulf states, facing sustained Iranian strikes on their energyinfrastructure, airports, and residential areas, consistently prioritizeddamage control and an end to hostilities over alignment with Washington'smilitary objectives, a position that held even as projections showed potentialGDP contractions of up to 14% for Qatar and Kuwait if the conflict continued.

Ahmed Fouad,professor of Israeli studies at Alexandria University, also speaking to ShafaqNews, cut to the structural problem Washington's regional strategy neverresolved: “the Gulf has been steered toward objectives that serve Israelistrategic interests rather than Arab ones, producing not a unified regionalfront but a collection of individual states each recalculating its own exposureat a different speed and toward a different conclusion.”

The GulfCooperation Council (GCC) has rarely functioned as a cohesive strategic bloc,and the war clarified rather than created those differences, with the UAEcalling publicly for Washington to finish the job after absorbing the heaviestvolume of Iranian strikes, Saudi Arabia condemning the attacks as"treacherous" while backing ceasefire talks and protecting Vision2030 investment flows, and Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait pushing consistently forde-escalation.

SaudiArabia's hostility toward Israel —rooted in domestic opinion and the economiclogic of Vision 2030— means that proximity to Washington, while it backsIsraeli regional policy, carries costs that proximity to Washington againstIran alone never did. The Abraham Accords architecture, which was supposed toabsorb that tension, revealed under fire the depth of the contradictions it hadpapered over rather than resolved.

Politicalneutrality has become operationally impossible for all of them, with the USmaintaining bases, naval facilities, and forward operating sites across atleast 19 locations in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar,Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, leaving Iranian targeting to treat those states asparticipants in the conflict regardless of their official positions.

Oman —whichkept its diplomatic channels with Tehran open and hosted the nuclear mediationrounds— was the only Gulf state Iran chose not to strike, a deliberate signalthe Gulf read with precision: alignment with Washington carries a cost, and sodoes the neutrality Washington's presence makes impossible.

Iran'sstrikes alienated states that had spent years pursuing rapprochement, with theMarch 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization agreement failing tosurvive the war's first weeks. That alienation has not translated into thestrategic alignment Washington needed —Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recently atodds, are now coordinating with Egypt, Jordan, Turkiye, Pakistan, andIndonesia, forming a coalition defined not by support for the American campaignbut by shared resistance to the trajectory it has created, the architecture ofa regional order Washington did not design and is not positioned to lead.

ForceWithout a Finish Line

The strategyproduced devastation without resolution, and across every pillar on which itrested, the same pattern holds: force sufficient to destroy the existingcondition, insufficient to dictate what replaces it.

SeniorIranian economic officials warned President Masoud Pezeshkian thatreconstruction may take more than a decade, with the Central Bank Governorurging an immediate peace deal to stabilize the economy. Iran is weaker than atany point since the revolution —its supreme leader killed, its nuclearinfrastructure struck, its proxy network dispersed, its currency in freefall.And yet the regime holds, which is why the most significant development of thepast 48 hours is not a military one.

A one-page,14-point memorandum of understanding is being negotiated between Trump's envoysSteve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and several Iranian officials, both directlyand through mediators. In its current form, the MOU would declare an end to thewar and the start of 30 days of negotiations on a detailed agreement to openthe strait, limit Iran's nuclear program, and lift US sanctions. Under theproposed terms, Iran would commit to a moratorium on uranium enrichment lastingat least 12 years —with some sources suggesting 15 years as a likely compromisebetween the US demand of 20 years and Iran's initial offer of five— and wouldpledge never to seek a nuclear weapon or conduct weaponization-relatedactivities, submitting to an enhanced inspections regime including snapinspections by UN monitors.

In exchange,the United States would agree to gradually lift sanctions and release billionsof dollars in frozen Iranian funds.

Americanofficials have described this as the closest the two sides have agreed sincethe war began, even as Iranian officials have publicly offered a morepessimistic view. Trump told Fox News that Iran has one week to respond,adding: "If they don't agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly,at a much higher level and intensity than it was before."

The contoursof the emerging deal reveal what the strategy ultimately achieved and where itfell short. Araghchi's red line —zero enrichment means no deal— appears to havebent: a moratorium is not elimination, but it is a significant concession froma government that refused any enrichment limits. Washington, for its part, isaccepting a time-limited freeze rather than the permanent dismantlement itlaunched a war to achieve.

Thesuspension of Project Freedom after less than 48 hours —described by Araghchihimself as "Project Deadlock"— captures the dynamic precisely: anoperation launched as a show of force, abandoned as a concession to diplomacy,with the blockade still in place and the strait still closed. Many of the termslaid out in the memo would be contingent on a final agreement being reached,leaving the possibility of renewed war or an extended limbo in which the hotwar has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.

In thestrait, hundreds of loaded oil tankers wait. The IAEA sits outside thefacilities that the war was launched to destroy. And the nuclear dilemma thatstarted all of this is moving toward an answer, not the one Washington went towar for, and not the one Tehran swore it would never accept, but somethingnegotiated in the space between two positions that neither side could holdindefinitely.

Written andedited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq power 2026: war on Iran collapses the grid's last defenses ahead of peak summer

Thu, 07 May 2026 11:19:50 +0000

Shafaq News

Iraq is facing its most severe electricity crisis in yearsas summer approaches, a convergence of war, sanctions, fiscal collapse, anddecades of structural failure that has simultaneously stripped Baghdad of itsprimary fuel source, drained the revenues needed to replace it, and leftcontingency projects unfinished as temperatures begin to climb toward 50degrees Celsius.

The scale of the shortfall is staggering even by Iraq'sstandards. The country is expected to face peak demand of roughly 40 gigawattsthis summer, compared with current production of approximately 29 gigawatts, accordingto data from the Washington-based Attaqa energy platform. In previous years,that gap was partly bridged by Iranian gas and electricity imports, but thishas largely collapsed because two decades of deferred investment and governancefailure left Iraq with no buffers when it did.

What makes the 2026 crisis structurally different from thosethat preceded it —in a country that has lived with chronic undersupply for twodecades— is the simultaneous collapse of the mechanisms Baghdad relied on tomanage it. Iranian gas flows, which underpinned nearly a third of Iraq'selectricity generation, have been severely disrupted by the war. And the oilrevenues that would ordinarily finance alternative energy arrangements remainunder sustained American pressure: Washington retains significant leverage overIraqi oil revenues, and has repeatedly threatened to restrict access unlessBaghdad moves decisively to curtail the Iran-aligned armed factions that aredeeply embedded in Iraqi political life. That leverage has not disappeared withthe war, as Iraq finds itself simultaneously losing its primary fuel source andunable to fully mobilize the fiscal resources needed to replace it.

A Supply Line Built On A Fault Line

For years, Iraq has depended on Iranian natural gas to fuelthe thermal power stations that generate the majority of its electricity. Atpeak supply, Iran was delivering around 30 million cubic meters of gas per day,enough to support nearly a third of Iraq's power generation capacity.

The arrangement required the United States to issue periodicsanctions waivers exempting Baghdad from penalties for purchasing Iranianenergy, and Washington used those waivers as leverage, repeatedly urging Iraqto reduce its dependency while renewing the exemptions under politicalpressure.

The Trump administration ended that ambiguity when the USsanctions waiver expired on March 8, 2025, cutting Iraq off from Iranianelectricity imports and placing its gas purchases under increasing pressure.Iranian gas flows dropped by roughly 40 percent between April and August 2025as sanctions enforcement tightened. Baghdad scrambled to negotiatealternatives, a Turkmenistan gas swap, floating LNG terminals in the south,accelerated interconnections with Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf CooperationCouncil, but each initiative moved more slowly than the crisis demanded.

Then, following strikes by the US and Israeli forces on Iranon February 28, 2026, the crisis entered a new phase. Reported strikes oninfrastructure connected to Iran's South Pars gas field —the world's largest—caused an abrupt halt in gas flows to Iraq, knocking more than 3,000 megawattsoff the national grid almost overnight. Partial flows later resumed, but thecurrent supply has since fallen again.

Ahmed Moussa, spokesperson for Iraq's Ministry ofElectricity, told Shafaq News that gas imports now stand at roughly 5 millioncubic meters per day, barely one-sixth of the 30 million cubic meters Iraqrequires.

The Fiscal Floor Disappears

The war has a dual effect: it damages Iraq's fuel supply anddestroys the financial capacity to replace it. Since the Strait of Hormuzclosure on February 28, Iraq's oil export revenues have dropped by nearly 90percent, according to the Attaqa platform's reporting. For a country where oilaccounts for roughly 90 percent of state income, this collapse is a paralysis.

The Ministry of Electricity acknowledged in April that acontract with Excelerate Energy to install a floating LNG processing platform—one of Baghdad's primary hedge mechanisms— faces delays that could push itscommissioning past the June target, directly into peak summer demand.

The cruelest dimension of Iraq's electricity crisis is whatthe country does with its own gas. Iraq holds the world's third-highest rate ofgas flaring, burning off at the wellhead the associated gas extracted alongsideoil, rather than capturing it for power generation. Iraq flared approximately18 billion cubic meters of gas in 2023 alone, according to World Bank data,enough to generate roughly 33 gigawatts of electricity, exceeding the country'sentire current production capacity. Iraq is, in other words, burning thesolution to its own crisis.

Is This Summer Different?

Spokesperson Ahmed Moussa revealed that the ministry isexecuting its summer readiness plan through maintenance, grid expansion, andtransmission upgrades, and that 254 megawatts from the Basra solar project and50 megawatts from Karbala are already operational, with further phases underwayacross several provinces.

Interconnection projects with Turkiye, Jordan, and the Gulfstates are advancing, he added, though their financing remains contingent onbudget approval.

“The ministry's plan is in its final stages,” he said,pointing out that gas shortage remains the single most consequential factoraffecting supply hours during peak season.

Despite the government’s initiatives, economic expertMohamed al-Hasani warned that Iraq is heading toward a genuine energy crisisthis summer, driven by seasonal demand and the compounding effect of fallingassociated gas output, incomplete import infrastructure, and the volatility ofIranian supply. "The country faces a clear gap in supplies. There are noready alternatives capable of filling the current fuel shortage," he toldShafaq News.

Economic analyst Hilal al-Ta'an described the problem inbroader terms, telling Shafaq News it is "a comprehensive gap betweenfuel, infrastructure, and demand management —a systems failure in which anydisruption to imported gas translates directly into blackout hours for ordinarycitizens." Real solutions, he cautioned, require years of sustainedgovernment investment, not seasonal fixes.

For ordinary Iraqis, the crisis translates into longblackout hours during extreme heat. By last summer, before the war had begun,central provinces including Najaf, Karbala, al-Diwaniyah, Babil, and Muthannawere already enduring daily blackouts of up to 12 hours, triggering protestsacross multiple cities. Demonstrators blocked roads, burned tires, andconfronted security forces. Private diesel generators fill the gap for thosewho can afford them. For low-income households —the majority in most of Iraq'ssouthern and central provinces— they cannot.

Iraq's electricity crises have historically been treated asseasonal emergencies, something to endure through summer and manage until thenext one. The 2026 crisis resists that framing. The war on Iran has onlycollapsed the three mechanisms Baghdad used to contain it: Iranian imports, oilrevenues, and the political breathing room that US sanctions waivers provided,all simultaneously, as temperatures rise and demand climbs toward levels thenational grid cannot come close to meeting.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq's oil lifeline is blocked: Here is why the crisis runs deeper than Hormuz

Wed, 06 May 2026 15:22:27 +0000

Shafaq News

When Iran effectively closed the Strait ofHormuz in late February, Iraq became one of the most exposed economies on theplanet. The country routes roughly 95 percent of its oil exports through thewaterway, and unlike its Gulf neighbors, it has no meaningful alternative suchas a Mediterranean pipeline, Red Sea outlet, or an overland corridor capable ofabsorbing industrial volumes.

Seaborne exports fell to 131,000 barrels per dayin April, a 96 percent collapse compared with April 2025. At the port of Basra,which under normal conditions handles up to 80 tankers per month, Bloombergvessel-tracking data showed only two vessels loaded cargo in April, down from12 in March. Since the latest escalation began, just three Iraqi crude tankershave managed to exit the strait, according to Hellenic Shipping News, leaving43 million barrels of Iraqi crude stranded on vessels west of the waterway —partof a broader Gulf-wide stockpile of 163 million barrels with nowhere to go.

What those figures do not immediately reveal iswhy the disruption has proven so total. The blockade is the starting point, notthe full explanation. Several interlocking failures have compounded theoriginal closure into something closer to a complete export shutdown.

The Insurance Barrier

Global marine insurers have effectively ceasedcovering vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz since active conflict betweenIran, the United States, and Israel made the waterway uninsurable understandard war-risk terms. Without coverage, cargo owners cannot move productregardless of whether a physical passage exists, rendering the question ofmilitary access largely academic.

Iran has reportedly exempted Iraqi crude fromits navigation restrictions, but that exemption is operationally irrelevant ifno insurer will underwrite the voyage. The discount, not the exemption, hasbecome Iraq's primary instrument for attracting buyers willing to self-insureor operate under flags with alternative coverage arrangements, and even thathas limits.

A SOMO notice dated May 3, reviewed byBloomberg, shows the scale of those concessions: Basrah Medium crude is offeredat $33.40 below official prices for loadings between May 1 and 10 —thehighest-risk window of the month— narrowing to $26 per barrel for the remainderof May, while Basrah Heavy is offered at $30 below official prices throughoutthe period.

The tiered structure reflects SOMO's ownassessment of risk, with the steepest discount attached to the earliest andmost dangerous loading window. The notice specifies that force majeureprovisions do not apply to these offers, given that the exceptionalcircumstances are known to all parties, placing the risk calculation squarelyon the buyer.

The Force Majeure Cascade

The shipping paralysis did not stop at theterminals. When exports stopped moving, storage at southern terminal facilitiesfilled rapidly, and with no outlet for produced crude and no room to storeadditional volumes, international oil companies operating fields acrosssouthern Iraq began declaring force majeure, a legal mechanism suspendingcontractual obligations under circumstances beyond a party's control.

Field shutdowns followed, and production volumesfell sharply as a direct consequence of export infrastructure failure, not ofany problem with the fields themselves. This distinction matters: the damage islogistical and contractual, not geological, which means recovery istheoretically faster once the waterway reopens, but the fiscal damageaccumulates daily regardless.

The Turkey Pipeline and Its Ceiling

Iraq does have one functioning export outletoutside the Gulf: the Iraq-Turkiye Pipeline, which carries crude from Kirkuk innorthern Iraq to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, and which hasoperated at reduced but functional capacity through the crisis. Its ceiling,however, is structurally limited. The pipeline handles a fraction of thevolumes that southern sea terminals process at full capacity, and years ofunderinvestment and periodic disputes between Baghdad and Erbil over revenuesharing have kept throughput well below its technical maximum. It is a pressurevalve, not a substitute.

The Fiscal Exposure

Iraq funds approximately 90 percent of itsfederal budget through oil revenues, a dependency long identified by theInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the country's primarystructural vulnerability. That vulnerability has now translated into an acutefiscal crisis, with a government already managing subsidy obligations, publicsector wage commitments, and reconstruction costs across multiple provinces nowoperating on a fraction of its normal revenue base. The 2025 federal budget wasbuilt around oil price and volume assumptions that the current crisis hasrendered obsolete.

The diplomatic path out —a deal betweenWashington and Tehran that reopens the strait— would not produce an immediaterecovery even if it materializes. Tanker queues would take weeks to clear,insurance terms would need to be renegotiated, and field production suspendedunder force majeure declarations would require time to restore. The damagealready absorbed by Iraq's export sector in April alone represents a loss thatno discount schedule can recover.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Ghazal Mulan died twice: under Iranian drones, and inside Iraqi Kurdistan's health system

Tue, 05 May 2026 21:37:49 +0000

Shafaq News

A 19-year-old Kurdish fighter survived an IRGC drone strike on al-Sulaymaniyah border camp —then died after multiple hospitals turned her away. Her case has exposed fault lines in the KRG's medical institutions, its obligations under international humanitarian law, and its unresolved relationship with the Iranian Kurdish armed opposition.

The drone struck the Surdash camp belonging to the Komala Iranian Kurdish opposition group at the Sulaymaniyah border on 14 April, in what the HANA human rights organization described as an operation carried out under an active two-week ceasefire —a violation, by their account, of an agreement that had briefly quieted one of the region's most persistent flashpoints.

Ghazal Mulan, 19, a member of the Komala Party of Kurdistan, was among those wounded. Two others were injured in the same strike.

She did not die from the drone. That distinction matters, and it is the reason her case has reverberated through Kurdish civil society for days, drawing statements from intellectuals, lawyers, women's rights advocates, and a Kurdish politician who ultimately buried her himself.

What followed the strike —the hours between injury and death— is contested in its detail but not, at its core, in its outcome. Ghazal Mulan passed through at least four medical facilities in al-Sulaymaniyah. She received first aid at Shorsh Hospital, a public facility affiliated with the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga health directorate. Still, because she did not receive the intensive care her injuries required, she died.

The Woman Behind The Case

Ghazal Mulan Shabarabadi was born in Bukan, a city in Iran's West Azerbaijan province with a dense Kurdish population and a long history of political resistance. She had been living in Mahabad, another city in the same province that carries particular weight in Kurdish memory as the capital of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad in 1946 —the first modern Kurdish state, which survived less than a year before Iranian forces crushed it.

She joined Komala in December 2025, according to a senior party official who spoke to Shafaq News on condition of anonymity. She had been active in political and women's rights work before enlisting. In the party's Peshmerga, the armed wing of an organization that has operated from bases in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for decades, she found a structure for that engagement.

Women have long held frontline and leadership roles across Kurdish armed movements. From the Peshmerga forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government to the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and their all-female counterpart, the YPJ, Kurdish military culture has, more than most in the region, integrated women into combat roles not as a symbolic gesture but as an operational reality. Ghazal's path was consistent with a tradition that predates her by generations —young Kurdish women from Iranian cities crossing into Iraq to join parties their governments have spent decades trying to eliminate.

She had been in the Peshmerga's ranks for roughly four months when the drone found her.

The Hospital Sequence

What happened next is the subject of competing accounts that the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Health has now formally pledged to investigate.

According to Komala, Ghazal was transported in the critical hours after the strike to several medical facilities in al-Sulaymaniyah province. Shorsh Hospital provided initial first aid but lacked the intensive care capacity required by the severity of her wounds. Her companions then attempted to secure admission at Baxshin Hospital and Asia International Hospital (AIH), both private facilities. Neither accepted her, and she died upon arrival at Faruk Medical City.

AIH Hospital has categorically denied this account. In a press conference, hospital representatives stated that Ghazal was never brought to their facility as a patient and that no telephone contact was made with them on her behalf. The hospital said any association of its name with the case was unacceptable.

Baxshin Hospital, in an initial statement, said the facility lacked an intensive care unit and cited the absence of a formal police report —a requirement, they said, under al-Sulaymaniyah Health Directorate guidelines for cases with security or legal dimensions. In a subsequent press conference, however, the account shifted: hospital officials said they had been actively working the phones to obtain authorization from the relevant authorities, and that Ghazal's companions had left the facility before that authorization came through. They said they contacted the companions and told them to return, and that they did not.

The Kurdish Ministry of Health, in an official statement, did not endorse either private hospital's account, pointing out that after Ghazal was transferred from Shorsh —a Peshmerga-affiliated public hospital— to Baxshin, "the necessary medical procedures were not carried out and she was not admitted, which led to her death." The ministry announced a formal investigation under Patient Rights Law No. 4 of 2020 and Investigation Instructions No. 16 of 2022, with both the al-Sulaymaniyah Health Directorate and the public prosecutor's office directed to pursue the case.

A Question Of Medical Neutrality

The legal frame around this case is not, strictly speaking, complicated, which is part of what makes the institutional response so difficult to defend.

The Geneva Conventions, to which Iraq is a signatory, establish a foundational principle: the wounded must be treated without discrimination based on identity, political affiliation, or party to a conflict. Refusing treatment to a critically injured person in an emergency setting constitutes, under this framework, a serious violation, one that legal scholars say can rise to criminal liability in some jurisdictions.

Iraq's domestic law reinforces this. The KRG's own Patient Rights Law, now being invoked in the investigation, is consistent with international standards: no patient in a life-threatening condition may be refused.

Al-Sulaymaniyah lawyer Rizan Dlir, speaking to Shafaq News, placed the responsibility squarely on the institutions involved. "The lawyers will follow this case to determine the specific duties of hospitals in emergencies," she said, adding that the burden of establishing the truth falls on the relevant authorities.

Rahman Gharib, coordinator of the Metro Centre for Journalists' Rights and Advocacy, went further, calling what occurred a violation of core medical ethics, one, he added, that sits poorly with the Kurdistan Region's self-presentation as an open and welcoming territory for refugees and displaced populations.

The "police report" requirement cited by Baxshin Hospital sits at the center of the legal dispute. Kurdish politician Sardar Abdullah, who took it upon himself to arrange Ghazal's burial after no institutional mechanism stepped in to do so, was direct: "Demanding a police report to treat a war-wounded fighter is an unacceptable excuse. War-wounded are treated everywhere, regardless of their affiliations." He described her as like a daughter and called his involvement a moral and national obligation —the minimum owed to someone who had received less than any other fallen fighter would ordinarily receive.

The Politics Underneath

The Surdash camp, and others like it across northern Iraq, have been the sites of recurring Iranian strikes for years. The camps house members of Iranian Kurdish opposition parties —Komala, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), and others— who have operated from Iraqi Kurdish territory since the 1980s. Tehran views them as security threats; Baghdad has faced sustained pressure to dismantle them; the KRG has historically occupied an uncomfortable middle position, providing implicit tolerance without formal endorsement.

HANA's description of the April 14 strike as a ceasefire violation adds a specific layer: the attack came during a negotiated pause, which, if accurate, signals either a deliberate decision to act regardless of commitments or a breakdown in the ceasefire's terms. Neither interpretation is reassuring.

The Komala official who spoke to Shafaq News declined to rule out a political dimension to the hospital refusals, saying that motivations of a "political or ideological nature cannot be excluded." That is an allegation, not a finding, and it must be treated as such. But it is also not an implausible allegation in a political environment where KRG institutions operate under sustained Iranian pressure, where the legal status of opposition fighters in the Region is ambiguous, and where private hospitals make risk calculations that are not purely medical.

Tanya Tahir, an academic at the University of Sulaimani, offered a more structural reading. Women dying in the Kurdish struggle is not new, she told Shafaq News, “but the behavior of some health institutions in this case was alien to the culture of al-Sulaymaniyah." She cautioned against politicizing the case or allowing it to be weaponized in factional disputes. Those who come from eastern Kurdistan, she said, are "on their own land and should not be treated as guests."

After Death

The complications did not end with Ghazal's death. The Komala official told Shafaq News that several mosques declined to receive her body for funeral rites, citing religious grounds —specifically, that a woman cannot be washed within a mosque. In Islamic tradition, the ritual washing of the body, known as Ghusl, is a religious obligation before burial, performed by same-sex attendants in a designated space. The official acknowledged that alternatives existed; the washing could have been completed in a private home, a common and accepted practice, but “these arrangements were never made."

Kurdish Islamic scholar and writer Idris Karitani described the episode as a departure from both religious values and human decency. He invoked examples from the Prophet Mohammad's biography, affirming the dignity of the human person regardless of identity, and called what happened to Ghazal "a mark of shame that will be difficult to erase."

Sardar Abdullah, the politician who arranged the burial, framed it plainly: “She deserved what any fighter receives. She did not receive it. So I stepped in.”.

The collective statement signed by Kurdish intellectuals, artists, and civil society figures called for a transparent and urgent judicial investigation, with findings made public. Accountability in cases like this is not just about one fighter from Bukan. It is about what the Kurdistan Region's institutions owe to the people —fighters, civilians, refugees— who pass through them in moments of crisis.

Ghazal Mulan spent four months in the military before an Iranian drone struck her camp. She spent a shorter time than that moving between hospitals that could not, or would not, save her. The investigation will determine which of those verbs applies. The answer will say something significant about the Region's institutions —and about the distance, still, between the Kurdistan Region's self-image and its practice.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

The mediator in the room: President Barzani comes to Baghdad with more than Erbil's demands

Tue, 05 May 2026 10:58:46 +0000

Shafaq News

In Baghdad, governments are not bornfrom ballot boxes alone; they emerge from a long chain of understandings,guarantees, and mutual anxieties, and it was into this chain that KurdistanRegion President Nechirvan Barzani pressed his weight during a two-day visit tothe capital that, in its timing and the breadth of its meetings, amounted tosomething more deliberate than protocol.

On the surface, the visit followed afamiliar pattern: a Kurdish leader arrives in Baghdad ahead of a new governmentcycle, reaffirms constitutional principles, and returns to Erbil. But thepolitical moment it landed in was anything but routine. Iraq's governmentformation process is unfolding under simultaneous pressure from an unresolvedregional conflict, Washington's recalibrating posture toward Baghdad, Tehran'scalculations about the next Iraqi cabinet, and a set of Erbil-Baghdad disputes—oil, salaries, budget allocations, the status of disputed territories underArticle 140— that have not left the negotiating table in years.

Within the first hours of hisarrival, Barzani met with leaders of the Shiite ruling Coordination Framework,including State of Law head, Nouri al-Maliki, caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, al-Hikma (Wisdom) Movement leader Ammar al-Hakim, then withprime minister-designate Ali Falah al-Zaidi, and leaders of the Sunni NationalPolitical Council.

The agenda moved from governmentformation to oil revenue sharing, salary arrears, the federal budget, and thenecessity of insulating Iraq from regional escalation —a range that reflectednot a courtesy call but a substantive attempt to shape the parameters of whatcomes next.

Official statements from themeetings emphasized the need for a government "commensurate with thechallenges of the current phase," capable of meeting the demands of Iraq'sconstituent communities while resolving outstanding Erbil-Baghdad disputes on aconstitutional basis. Barzani also reaffirmed Kurdistan's readiness to supportthe new government's formation.

Testing the Ground

Kurdish politician Abd al-SalamBarwari described the visit as "a new positive development for breakingthe tensions that accompanied the post-presidential election phase"—tensions that had been building since the KDP staked a claim to the Iraqipresidency as a matter of established political entitlement, only to find Sunniand Shiite coalition leaders divided between rival Kurdish candidates, withsome backing the PUK's nominee, Nizar Amedi, over Fuad Hussein, one of theKDP's most senior figures. Barwari was careful to characterize Barzani'smeetings as exploratory rather than conclusive— closer to preliminaryconsultations for testing positions and exchanging views before the moment ofdecision than to a finalized political settlement.

Speaking to Shafaq News, Barwaripointed to al-Zaidi's recent visit to Erbil, where the prime minister-designatemet separately with Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Masoud Barzani,President Nechirvan Barzani, PM Masrour Barzani, and Patriotic Union ofKurdistan head, Bafel Talabani, as evidence that the Kurdistan Region'sposition is being treated as a structural variable in the government formationcalculus, not an afterthought.

The KDP's weight in that calculus isconcrete: the party secured over one million votes in November's parliamentaryelections, the highest total of any single party nationwide, translating into26 seats in parliament, making it a bloc no government formation can ignoremathematically. Political circles in Baghdad read that visit as an attempt toavoid repeating the crises that plagued previous governments' relationshipswith the Region from the outset.

Researcher in political affairsSuhad al-Shammari offered a broader frame, noting that the current governmentformation is unfolding in conditions meaningfully different from previouscycles, with a prime minister-designate navigating simultaneously betweenrebuilding trust among political forces, managing divisions within eachcommunity, and arranging a working relationship with the Kurdistan Region thatdoes not begin in confrontation.

Barzani's visit, in her assessment,signals Kurdistan's readiness to “engage constructively,” though she stoppedshort of predicting specific outcomes, describing the visit's likelycontribution as “bringing positions closer rather than resolving the underlyingdisputes.”

That picture from the meetings saidmore than any statement. In one session with leaders of the Sunni NationalPolitical Council, Barzani sat at the center flanked by prominent Sunnifigures, including rivals Khamis al-Khanjar and Mohammed al-Halbousi, acomposition that appeared to summarize the visit's function.

He was not present solely as Erbil'srepresentative but as someone operating in the grey space between adversaries,attempting to anchor a proposition: that the next government cannot be bornfrom an internal Shiite understanding alone, nor from an isolated distributionof positions, but from a broader equilibrium that includes Kurds, Sunnis, andShiites within a single political architecture. Both sides agreed that the newgovernment must prioritize services and reconstruction, and that dialogue amongpolitical forces must be the entry point for resolving crises rather than aformality that follows them.

Files That Never Leave the Table

Political analyst Ali al-Baydarsituated the visit within a structural argument, telling Shafaq News that theissue is less about individual political figures than about the prevailingpolitical culture, and that the next government will largely be a continuationof the Coordination Framework's internal balances, with the variable being howBaghdad manages its relationship with Erbil rather than whether thatrelationship changes fundamentally.

Al-Baydar assessed al-Zaidi assomeone disinclined toward escalation with the Region or toward unilateraldecisions against it, suggesting the new prime minister-designate may offermore room for addressing outstanding files within constitutional frameworksthan his predecessors, while leaving open whether that room translates intoresolved disputes.

Hussein al-Kinani, head of al-HadafCenter for Studies, noted to Shafaq News that Barzani's meetings with al-Zaidifall within the standard pattern of coalition-building that precedes every newgovernment cycle, but that their substantive content centers on concreteunresolved files: the federal budget, oil exports, oil and non-oil revenues,and the degree to which both Erbil and Baghdad have honored previousagreements.

Those files carry weight beyond thepolitical. Salaries in the Kurdistan Region have become a recurring livingcrisis for the population. Oil has become the permanent headline of theconstitutional and financial dispute between Erbil and Baghdad, a disputesharpened in 2023 when the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris ruledthat Turkiye must pay Iraq approximately $1.5 billion for breaching theIraq-Turkiye Pipeline agreement by allowing unauthorized Kurdish oil exports,halting loading, and export operations through the pipeline, and significantlyimpacting the Region's revenues. The budget, renegotiated in cycles, hasexposed the fragility of arrangements that both sides treat as temporary. Takentogether, they make Barzani's visit an early test of whether the incominggovernment intends to manage these crises as it finds them or move towardclosing them, a distinction that matters more to the Region's population thanto the political class on either side.

Al-Zaidi is operating under timepressure, constitutionally required to present his cabinet within 30 days, andaware that passing the government will require more than a numericalparliamentary majority; it will require understandings that ensure Kurdish andSunni participation within an arrangement that no party feels excluded from.

Barzani's visit, in this reading,functions as an attempt to produce a dual political guarantee: an assurance toErbil that the incoming Baghdad will not revert to the language of financialpressure and punitive measures, and an assurance to Baghdad that the Regionwill be a source of governmental stability rather than a recurring source oftension.

The details of ministerialportfolios and the distribution of positions also remain subject to ongoingnegotiation. What Barzani's visit makes visible is that the contest over thenext government is not only about who enters the cabinet, but about the shapeof the state that cabinet will manage, the boundaries of the relationshipbetween center and Region, and Iraq's capacity to hold its internalarrangements together in a region changing faster than its political class ismoving to keep pace.

The Bill Comes Due

Three baseline conditions Barzaniwanted to stress before the new government takes shape: genuine partnership indecision-making, constitutional rather than provisional solutions to theoutstanding files, and Iraq's insulation from the currents of regionalescalation. Whether those conditions become structurally embedded in the nextgovernment or remain aspirational language in post-meeting statements is thequestion the visit leaves open.

Written and edited by Shafaq Newsstaff.

Iraq's press freedom index falls amid armed factions kidnappings, record violations

Sun, 03 May 2026 23:07:57 +0000

Shafaq News

Thirty-three days before Reporters Without Borders published its annual verdict on press freedom worldwide, a car pulled up alongside American journalist Shelly Kittleson on Saadoun Street in central Baghdad. Two men bundled her into the back seat. By the time Iraqi security forces intercepted one of the getaway vehicles near the town of Al-Haswa in Babil province, Kittleson was gone, and the trail led to Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iranian-backed forces operating inside Iraq's official security architecture.

The abduction on March 31 was a dispatch from the environment that the 2026 RSF index has now formally recorded: Iraq has fallen to 162nd place out of 180 countries, down seven positions from last year, with an overall score of 28.85 out of 100. The economic indicator —which measures the financial independence of media— is the weakest of all five categories, placing Iraq 169th globally. Armed conflict, political capture, and structural economic precarity have combined to make Iraq one of the most hostile press environments on earth, and the index reflects a year in which that hostility became measurably worse.

The regression matters beyond the numbers. A year ago, Iraq had climbed fourteen places —from 169th to 155th— in what some observers read as tentative progress. That reading was always contested by journalists on the ground. The 2026 figure forecloses the debate. RSF now places Iraq in the same category as Sudan and Yemen, countries defined by active armed conflict, identifying recurring violence as the primary driver of decline.

A Profession Under Institutional Siege

The Kittleson kidnapping crystallized, for an international audience, a threat that Iraqi journalists have described for years. The US Embassy had warned her repeatedly to leave the country in the weeks before her abduction. She had written, just that morning, about drone and missile strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan. The warning came while she was already inside Baghdad, and she stayed.

That calculus —stay and risk, leave and silence— is familiar to Iraqi reporters who cannot relocate to Italy between assignments. The Journalists' Rights Defense Association recorded 182 violations against journalists across Iraq in 2025 alone: two killings, seven kidnappings, 53 cases of blocked coverage, 24 equipment confiscations, 28 legal complaints, and 11 physical assaults.

Baghdad accounted for 62 of those violations, the highest of any province. The Al-Nakheel Center for Rights and Press Freedoms documented more than 100 violations in 2025, with 35 more recorded in the first quarter of 2026 alone, spanning arrests, coverage bans, and institutional pressure on media organizations.

Ziad Al-Ajili, head of the Press Freedoms Center, told Shafaq News that 2025 and 2026 represent among the worst years for Iraqi journalism in recent memory. Restrictions on journalists' movement and access, he said, have increasingly limited field reporting, even as digital tools like artificial intelligence offer theoretical workarounds that institutional and security constraints make difficult to use in practice.

The legal framework compounds the physical danger. Iraq's 1969 Penal Code remains the primary instrument deployed against journalists, its vague provisions on "public morals" and "public order" offering prosecutors wide latitude to pursue reporters who probe corruption or criticize officials. A cybercrime bill that has been repeatedly resubmitted to parliament provides for life imprisonment for online content deemed harmful to national unity, economic interests, or security, categories broad enough to encompass almost any investigative journalism.

In August 2025, the outgoing parliament revived a draft law originally titled the Law on Freedom of Expression, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration. In its revived form, all references to "freedom of expression" and the "right to knowledge" had been stripped from both the title and its articles. Legal experts who reviewed the draft for Shafaq News identified at least 17 fundamental flaws requiring complete reconstruction. The bill passed from parliament without becoming law. It now sits with a new legislature whose political composition offers little grounds for optimism.

Read more: The Fine Print of Freedom

Kurdistan's Exceptionalism Collapses

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq has long presented itself, and been received internationally, as a comparatively open media environment, a partial exception to the repression that characterizes Baghdad and the south. That claim did not survive 2025.

Violations against journalists in the Kurdistan Region nearly doubled last year, reaching 315 cases according to the Metro Center for Journalists' Rights, including 74 physical assaults or direct attacks, 53 incidents of equipment seizure or destruction, and 120 coverage bans. Security forces detained journalists without warrants, searched mobile phones, and violated privacy protections. The Metro Center described the findings as evidence of a "serious crisis in the rule of law."

The cases are specific and documented. In February 2025, Kurdistan security forces teargassed at least 22 journalists and arrested two while they were covering a teachers' protest over unpaid salaries, reporters subjected to harsher treatment, witnesses said, than the demonstrators themselves.

In August, journalist Sherwan Sherwani, already imprisoned since 2020 on espionage charges that human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the United Nations, have characterized as politically motivated, received an additional four years and five months in prison while serving prior sentences. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the sentencing a demonstration of the authorities' determination to silence critical voices permanently.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two dominant parties that control the Region's political and security apparatus, have both been linked to intimidation campaigns against journalists investigating corruption and official misconduct.

RSF's 2026 profile of Iraq notes that in the Kurdistan Region, critical journalists have been accused of espionage and imprisoned, a pattern that Amnesty International, in a report issued ahead of last year's World Press Freedom Day, described as a "ludicrous" contradiction of the region's self-proclaimed status as a beacon of press freedom.

A Profession Being Economically Suffocated

Behind the arrests and the kidnappings lies a structural erosion that international indices are poorly designed to capture. Iraqi journalists do not only fear gunmen and defamation lawsuits. They fear unemployment.

Jumanah Mumtaz, a journalist who spoke to Shafaq News, described media institutions that dismiss staff without notice, without compensation, and frequently without legal contracts, leaving reporters, particularly those with families and financial obligations, in a position of permanent professional insecurity.

Inas Halim of Al-Sharqiya television described a labor market in which violations routinely include termination without warning or severance, and in which the journalists' syndicate lacks the capacity to provide basic protections, including social security and retirement coverage.

Haider Shalal Mutaab, an academic specializing in media, told Shafaq News that the economic transformation of the Iraqi media sector and the acceleration of digital platforms have produced a more fragile, less stable labor market for journalists. The threats and the absence of legal protection, he said, directly undermine professional stability and reduce reporters' capacity to cover sensitive subjects.

This is the dimension of press freedom that does not appear in security indicators: the slow economic suffocation of independent journalism. RSF's own data shows Iraq's economic indicator at 169th globally —its lowest-ranked category— reflecting a media landscape in which financial survival depends overwhelmingly on alignment with political patrons.

The greater a political party's resources, the more one-sided the outlet tends to be, the organization notes. Independent journalism is not merely dangerous in Iraq. It is, for most practitioners, economically infeasible.

Read more: The New era of control

What The New Parliament Inherits

Iraq's new parliament, shaped by the dominant political blocs that emerged from the 2025 elections, enters its term with the gutted press freedom bill in committee, 182 recorded violations from the prior year on the record, and a ranking that has reversed the modest gains of 2024. That regression carries regional weight: Iraq now sits in the lower tier of Arab press freedom rankings —behind Qatar, Morocco, and Lebanon, but ahead of Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, which recorded the steepest Arab decline after authorities executed journalist Turki Al-Jasser in 2025.

The Kittleson case —an American journalist, abducted in daylight, by an armed group that operates within the state's own security structure— placed Iraq's press environment briefly on the front pages of international outlets before other crises displaced it.

For Iraqi journalists, there was nothing brief about it. The trajectory of the index, the documented violations, and the economic conditions that make independent reporting structurally unviable all point in the same direction. Whether the legislature elected in 2025 produces a law that reverses that trajectory, or whether it produces nothing —or something worse— is the problem that the next index should solve.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq after the regional ceasefire: US bases and unresolved political questions

Sun, 03 May 2026 12:30:59 +0000

Shafaq News

Since April 8,no confirmed attack has been recorded against US military installations inIraq. Drone activity has continued in Erbil and Al-Sulaymaniyah provinces inthe days following the ceasefire, though these targeted Kurdish security sitesand Iranian opposition camps rather than aUS positions directly.

The ceasefire,reached through Pakistani mediation between Washington and Tehran, has held on thatspecific front; however, it has not altered any of the conditions that madethose attacks possible, effective, and, according to the armed factionsthemselves, far from over.

The UnitedStates spent the 40 days between February 28 and April 8 absorbing anunprecedented tempo of drone and missile strikes on its installations,diplomatic facilities, and contractor personnel across Iraq. It responded withretaliatory airstrikes on Iran-aligned armed factions, groups formallyintegrated into the Iraqi state.

Thatcalculation -keep Iraq a manageable distraction, not a second front- shapedevery American decision in the country during the conflict. The ceasefirepreserved it, for now, but the factions, the vulnerabilities, and the politicaldysfunction that made the campaign possible are all still in place. AndBaghdad’s newly designated prime minister, a political novice with acomplicated financial biography, has 30 days to form a government capable ofnavigating what his predecessors could not.

The Campaign

When the UnitedStates and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, targetingmilitary infrastructure and killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iraq andLebanon immediately became secondary theaters of the wider war. The IslamicResistance in Iraq (IRI), an umbrella grouping of Iran-aligned armed factionsthat had already conducted more than 170 attacks on US military assets sinceOctober 2023, dramatically escalated its operations. Washington’s preferencewas clear: keep the Iraqi front contained, manageable, and below the thresholdthat would require the kind of direct, sustained military engagement that wouldconsume attention and resources needed elsewhere.

That preferencewas immediately tested. Between February 28, 2026, and the ceasefireannouncement on April 8, Shafaq News documented over 900 strikes landing on theUS logistical support center at Baghdad International Airport and the USEmbassy compound in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, causing damage andtriggering lockdowns. Air defense systems engaged repeatedly over Erbil andaround Harir Base in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the American presence issignificant. The scope of attacks expanded to energy infrastructure in northernIraq, including the Lanaz refinery in Erbil and the Sarsang oil field in Duhok.

In theKurdistan Region alone, about 650 attacks were recorded over those 40 days,with US diplomatic and military facilities among the primary targets.

The IRI’scampaign extracted concessions from the strategic environment without battlefieldvictory. It operated on a logic of attrition: not destroying American assets,but making the cost of maintaining them —in personnel, contractor presence, andpolitical capital— prohibitively high. Nowhere was this logic more precise thanat Martyr Brigadier General Ali Flaih Air Base, formerly known as Balad,located roughly 70 kilometers north of Baghdad in Saladin province.

Balad is theoperational hub of Iraq’s American-supplied F-16 fighter fleet, maintainedunder a contract worth over $252 million awarded to V2X, a Colorado-baseddefense firm formed through the merger of Vectrus and Vertex Aerospace, andrunning through late 2026. A senior security source inside the base told ShafaqNews it sustained approximately 13 drone attacks during the heightened US-Irantensions. The strikes were aimed not at the aircraft but at the contractorsresponsible for maintaining them. The F-16s remain protected in more than 35hardened underground shelters.

In an interviewwith our agency, security expert Abdul Sattar Al-Jubouri said the withdrawal offoreign contractors created a technical vacuum that Iraqi personnel cannotfill, particularly for software systems, advanced avionics, and complexcomponent overhauls.

Former IraqiAir Force officer Jamal Al-Azzawi described Iraqi teams at Balad as capable ofhandling routine maintenance, but acknowledged the gap left by the contractordepartures.

An employee ofV2X, speaking anonymously to a British outlet in March, called the base ahigh-value target with more than 200 American nationals on site, and reportedthat some Iraqi military and contract employees had been passing sensitiveoperational information to IRI-affiliated contacts in preparation for furtherstrikes.

Renad Mansour,a senior research fellow at Chatham House, described the governing dynamic thatmakes this possible: the armed factions “have one foot in the state and onefoot out of the state.” That hybrid model, simultaneously part of Iraq’s formalsecurity apparatus and operationally autonomous from it, is precisely whatallows IRI-affiliated networks to gather intelligence inside a base nominallyunder Iraqi government control.

The Ain al-AsadAir Base in western Al-Anbar province —historically the larger of the twoprincipal American installations in Iraq— is no longer part of this equation.On January 18, 2026, the United States completed a full withdrawal from thebase, handing control to the Iraqi army. What remained of the Americanfootprint before February 28 was concentrated at Erbil Air Base in IraqiKurdistan and the contractor presence at Balad. The IRI’s campaign targetedboth.

The Ceasefire

The two-weekceasefire, brokered by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, required Iranto reopen the Strait of Hormuz while the United States and Israel haltedstrikes on Iranian territory. The IRI simultaneously announced a suspension ofits operations in Iraq and across the region. Then, the Iraqi flags and Iranianflags were waved together in Tahrir Square in Baghdad.

The ceasefirefrayed almost immediately. Iran-aligned armed factions continued drone attacksnear the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center and Baghdad International Airport onthe day it took effect, prompting the US Embassy to warn American citizensagainst further possible attacks and to avoid air travel. Since the ceasefire’simplementation, the Kurdistan Region has been hit by a further 48 attacks. All,according to Shafaq News sources, directed at Iranian Kurdish opposition sitesand conducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rather thanIRI-affiliated factions, bringing the documented total since February 28 to695. The ceasefire, extended at least once at Pakistan’s request, has beenviolated by both sides and functions as a negotiating framework rather than adurable agreement.

What theceasefire does not address is as significant as what it halted. Iran’s 10-pointcounter-proposal, which Tehran has framed as the basis Washington accepted,includes the withdrawal of all American forces from bases across the region.That demand, if pressed in negotiations, would eliminate the residual USpresence at Erbil Air Base and the contractor mission at Balad, both of whichBaghdad has simultaneously asked Washington to maintain.

Meanwhile, thearmed factions have made their own position explicit. Hezbollah Al-Nujaba, oneof the IRI’s most prominent constituent factions, declared this week that Iraqwould permanently remain the “striking force” of the Resistance Axis anddescribed its fighters as “martyrdom projects” on that path. “We renew ourpledge and covenant,” the group said in a statement addressed to AyatollahMojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated Supreme Leader, “we —the sons ofal-Nujaba— will remain your loyal soldiers.” Al-Nujaba, along with otherIRI-affiliated factions, claims hundreds of attacks on US militaryinstallations in Iraq and across the region since February 28 —a figure thatcannot be independently verified but is directionally consistent withdocumented evidence. The guns have paused. The intent has not.

The NewGovernment

Into thisenvironment steps Ali Al-Zaidi, named prime minister-designate on April 27 aftera political deadlock that lasted more than five months following Iraq'sNovember 2025 parliamentary elections. Al-Zaidi, 40, is a businessman who hasnever held government office. His path to the nomination was shaped as much bywhat he is not as by what he is: former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, adeeply divisive pro-Iran figure, withdrew after his candidacy ran into fierceopposition —both from some parties within the Coordination Framework (aShiite-led coalition that underpins the current parliamentary majority) itselfand from Washington, which threatened to cut all US support to Iraq if he tookoffice and suspended nearly $500 million in dollar shipments to Baghdad toreinforce the point. Al-Zaidi emerged from the wreckage of that deadlock as a consensusno one had planned for.

The US Embassyin Baghdad quickly welcomed the outcome, extending its "best wishes"to Al-Zaidi and expressing support for Iraq's sovereignty and "securityfree from terrorism" —language that functions as diplomatic shorthand forWashington's core demand: meaningful action against IRI-affiliated armedfactions operating inside the Iraqi state.

Tehran movedwith equal speed, though with markedly different emphasis. Iran's ForeignMinister Abbas Araghchi congratulated “my brother” Al-Zaidi on his designationand affirmed Tehran's "respect for Iraq's sovereignty" and supportfor "political stability, development, and enhanced cooperation"serving the interests of both peoples —a formulation that conspicuouslysidesteps the security architecture question altogether and instead frames therelationship in terms of bilateral economic and political alignment.

That bothcapitals issued congratulations within the same diplomatic window, yet inlanguages pointing in opposite directions, captures precisely the structuralbind Al-Zaidi inherits: a government whose external legitimacy depends onsatisfying patrons whose core demands are mutually exclusive.

Al-Zaidi’sbiography complicates the picture. He served as chairman of Al-Janoob IslamicBank, which faced restrictions on US dollar transactions as part of a widercrackdown on sanctions evasion, and has been linked in reports to alleged moneylaundering on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Thoseallegations remain unverified. But they frame the central question hisnomination poses: Is Al-Zaidi a genuine compromise figure capable of navigatingbetween Washington and Tehran, or a lowest-common-denominator candidate whosefinancial entanglements will limit his room to move on the question thatmatters most —the armed factions?

The next Iraqigovernment will face a set of overlapping challenges shaped by both domesticconstraints and external pressure. Washington is expected to press Baghdad tomove against Iran-aligned armed factions it designates as terroristorganizations, even as those same groups remain embedded within Iraq’s rulingcoalition and maintain close ties to Tehran.

At the sametime, Baghdad will need to rebuild relations with Gulf states that weretargeted by Iranian drones and missiles during the conflict and are now callingfor clear steps to curb the influence of armed factions operating from Iraqiterritory.

Economicpressures are also likely to weigh heavily. Disruptions to oil exports duringthe closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the country’s reliance on cruderevenues, which make up around 90 percent of the state's income.

Anotherunresolved issue concerns the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), astate-sanctioned paramilitary network formed during the fight against ISIS.While formally integrated into the armed forces in 2016, many of its factionscontinue to operate with significant autonomy. Their political influence,particularly within the Coordination Framework, limits the scope for anygovernment seeking to impose tighter control.

What Remains

Before February28, the attrition campaign against US installations could be framed as amanageable, if persistent, security challenge —episodic strikes, intercepteddrones, pro forma condemnations from Baghdad that no one took seriously. Fortydays of open warfare stripped that framing away and made visible what hadalways been structurally true: the United States is trying to sustain amilitary and contractor presence in a country whose government shares powerwith the armed factions attacking it.

Iraq’s airforce flies American jets, maintained by American contractors, inside a basewhere IRI-affiliated networks have been mapping personnel and passingintelligence to the factions that attacked it. The government that formallyasked the United States to leave has asked it to stay. The CoordinationFramework that nominated Al-Zaidi includes, among its constituent members, theleader of Asaib Ahl Al-Haq —a US-designated terrorist organization. Americanretaliatory airstrikes during the conflict hit Kataib Hezbollah and BadrOrganization positions —both formally integrated into the Iraqi Armed Forces—placing Baghdad in the position of explaining US strikes on its own securityservices.

Washington’spreference throughout has been to keep Iraq a secondary theater, a manageabledistraction rather than a second front. The ceasefire preserved thatpreference. But the armed factions have explicitly rejected the premise.Al-Nujaba’s pledge of permanent war, issued during an active ceasefire,addressed to a new Iranian Supreme Leader, signals that the pause is tactical,not terminal. The factions are not standing down. They are waiting.

Al-Zaidi'spredecessors, operating with deeper political experience and more stable regionalconditions, could not resolve the contradiction at the core of Iraq’s securityarchitecture. Nothing in al-Zaidi’s biography, his political base, or thediplomatic framework currently on the table suggests he has a theory of howIraq escapes the position it is in.

Written andedited by Shafaq News staff.

International Labor Day in Iraq: A holiday in search of its workers

Fri, 01 May 2026 16:32:37 +0000

Shafaq News

As much of the world marks May 1 as a tribute to the labormovement, Iraq's roughly 15 million workers face a holiday largely emptied ofits meaning. International Labor Organization data shows that 66.6% of totalemployment in the country is informal –workers operating without contracts, withoutlegal guarantees, and largely outside the reach of the state.

The conditions that produce that figure are visible acrossconstruction sites, car washes, and shop floors, where complaints of meagerwages, punishing hours, and the near-total absence of legal protection haveturned the holiday into something closer to a reminder of what Iraqi labor doesnot have.

Name Without Content

In Baghdad's industrial zone, Ali Mohammed begins each shiftat a car wash at 08:00 a.m. and finishes at 06:00 p.m. —sometimes not before 7or 8 in the evening. For that day's work, he told Shafaq News, he earns 10,000Iraqi dinars, or just over six dollars, and the shop owner provides no workallowances and no meals beyond a single lunch, usually a falafel wrap. In winter,when business slows, the daily rate drops to 5,000 dinars. He has tried to findbetter-paying work with shorter hours, but unemployment has closed those doors.

Ali Saadoun, a bricklayer, dismissed International Labor Dayas “just a name without content.” What mattered to him was finishing his workand collecting his daily pay, while the talk of workers' rights from governmentand trade unions is “a laughable lie repeated at every occasion.” Workers clingto whatever job they can find, however poor the wage and hard the conditions,because the alternative is hunger for their families, and when employerswithhold pay, the worker has no real recourse —neither the law nor the unionsdeliver justice.

Working women face the system at its sharpest. Lama Abdulkarimworked 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. in a shop without a contract, social security,or any documented rights, and once her employer learned she was pregnant, hedismissed her. With no path to redress, she recalled, all she could do was“congratulate the woman hired to replace me, say goodbye to my colleagues, andwalk out quietly.”

Lama's experience reflects a labor market in which women arebarely present to begin with. ILO figures put female labor force participationin Iraq at roughly 11.76% against 74% for men, leaving the bulk of Iraqi womenexcluded from the formal economy entirely.

Rules on Paper

Iraq's own union leadership does not dispute the picture.Speaking to Shafaq News, Ali Al-Jabri, administrative director of the IraqiFederation of Trade Unions, acknowledged that workers' conditions remainstructurally precarious, particularly in the private sector and the informaleconomy. He cited youth unemployment, the prevalence of work without formalcontracts or legal guarantees, sharp pay gaps between the public and privatesectors, unsafe workplaces, and chronic delays in disbursing wages.

Al-Jabri's proposed remedies center on enforcement: applyingthe minimum wage in line with actual living costs, establishing strictoversight to curb exploitation, protecting workers from arbitrary dismissal,guaranteeing safe workplaces, defending the freedom to organize withoutpressure, and obliging employers to issue formal contracts. “Achieving socialjustice begins with delivering justice to workers themselves.”

“The situation is very complex,” according to Walid Naama,head of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, who explained that mostprivate-sector workers operate without contracts or safeguards. The majorityearn less than 300,000 dinars (around $230) a month —a figure that falls belowIraq's statutory minimum wage of 350,000 IQD, set under Labor Law No. 37 of2015 and left unchanged since.

Baghdad saw these problems, and more, carried into thestreets on Friday, when a large march moved from Firdos Square toward NasrSquare. Marchers raised banners calling for the activation of the civil servicelaw, the adoption of a fair salary scale, and the establishment of a social andhealth insurance system that would protect workers' dignity.

The demands are not new, and neither are the conditions thatproduced them. For Iraq's labor force, May Day this year arrived less as acelebration than as a measure of how far the rhetoric of workers' rights stillsits from the conditions in which most of them work.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq’s import trap: A system that produces demand, not supply

Fri, 01 May 2026 11:55:51 +0000

Shafaq News

Every day, above the oil fields of southern Iraq, gas burnsoff into the sky in towers of orange flame. Iraq flares 1,200 million standardcubic feet of gas per day —enough, if captured, to power the industries thecountry doesn't have. Instead, Baghdad imports gas from Iran to generateelectricity for the factories that cannot run without it. It pays billions forthe fuel it is simultaneously destroying. The ships that arrive at Umm Qasrcarrying rice, sugar, and cooking oil are a symptom of the same logic: acountry that possesses what it needs, and cannot stop paying others to provideit.

Iraq’s GDP stood at $279.6 billion in 2024, according to theWorld Bank. In that same year, oil accounted for 89% of the country's foreignexchange earnings, with crude oil accounting for between 92 and 99% of totalexports. The country sits atop one of the largest hydrocarbon reserves onearth. And yet it cannot feed itself, power its factories reliably, ormanufacture goods that compete on its own domestic market.

The standard explanation —weak institutions, post-wardamage, incomplete reconstruction—describes symptoms while leaving the causeuntouched. The more accurate account is this: the political economy that oilbuilt in Iraq actively destroys the conditions under which domestic productioncould ever compete. Every boom has deepened the dependency rather than reducingit, not by accident but by design, because the system that distributes oilrevenues is also the system that governs, and it has no incentive to change.

$80 Billion in Imports

Iraq's annual import bill exceeds $80–90 billion in goods,according to Iraqi Ministry of Planning estimates. That number is strikingbecause of what it covers. Between 80 and 100% of many basic staples, includingwheat, rice, and sugar. The dependency on agricultural imports has beenbuilding since the mid-1960s, accelerating through each successive conflict,and never reversed during the periods of relative stability and high oil pricesthat should, theoretically, have enabled investment in domestic alternatives.

The USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service documented what thislooks like at ground level in its most recent grain reporting on Iraq. In onerecent drought year, the planted area for paddy rice fell by 96% compared tothe previous season, as the government restricted cultivation areas in thesouth due to water shortages. Iraq —a country bisected by the Tigris andEuphrates, ancient breadbasket of the Fertile Crescent— cannot reliably growits own rice.

The gap between what Iraq consumes and what it produces isnot a temporary problem awaiting the right infrastructure investment; it is thesettled outcome of a structural transformation that oil revenue accelerated andthat no government since 2003 has found either the tools or the political willto reverse.

Dutch Disease, Iraqi Edition

Economists have a precise term for what happened: Dutchdisease describes the way a resource boom creates overreliance on one sector atthe expense of others, operating through two channels: a resource movementeffect, where labor migrates from manufacturing to the booming sector, causingdirect deindustrialization; and a spending effect, where increased revenuesraise demand for non-tradable goods, causing indirect deindustrialization. Iraqexhibits both channels in their most acute form.

Oil extraction accounts for 55% of Iraqi GDP; manufacturing,construction, water, and electricity combined account for 8%. Agricultureaccounts for 4%. The tradable, productive sectors of the economy were notgradually outcompeted; they were crowded out by a state that, flushed withpetrodollars, found it cheaper and politically easier to employ people directlythan to build the conditions for a private economy.

Iraq's labor force numbers around 15 million people, andapproximately 42% work in the public sector, an outcome rooted in decades ofstate-centered economic policy, first institutionalized under the Ba'ath regimeand later reinforced during the post-2003 reconstruction period. The World Bankreported that the average Iraqi public employee generates 17 minutes ofeffective work per day. More than 10.5 million Iraqi citizens —approximately aquarter of the total population— receive a monthly salary from the state.Salary and pension obligations now exceed $48 billion annually, close to 40% ofthe federal budget, according to Iraq's Federal Board of Supreme Audit.

Every dinar spent retaining a surplus civil servant is adinar not spent on the power grid, the roads, or the credit facilities thatwould allow a private manufacturer to exist, let alone compete.

Factories That Cannot Run

Of all the structural obstacles facing Iraqi producers, noneis more concrete or more consequential than electricity, and the way thecountry manages its own energy.

Iraq is the world's second-largest gas-flaring country afterRussia, burning 1,200 million standard cubic feet per day while simultaneouslyimporting gas from Iran at a cost of billions of dollars annually, spendingroughly $2.78 billion on Iranian gas in 2021 alone, and twice that thefollowing year, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Thefuel that could power Iraqi industry is instead lit on fire above the fieldsthat produce it, while the state pays a neighbor for the replacement.

The supply gap this creates is severe, even before an acuteoutage in the summer season, Iraq generates around 24,000 megawatts,considerably less than the estimated 34,000 megawatts needed to meet localdemand. The International Energy Agency projects the deficit will persist: evenif all planned capacity additions are completed and transmission reformsimplemented, Iraq will still face a shortage of approximately 10,000 megawattsover the next five years.

For a manufacturer, unreliable electricity is not aninconvenience; it is a structural cost that no tariff protection can offset. Afactory running on backup diesel generators faces energy expenses far abovethose of competitors in Turkiye, Iran, or China, where power is stable andoften subsidized. Iraqi producers are asked to compete internationally with onehand tied behind their back, and then told the problem is that their hand isweak.

The financial structure of the electricity sector ensuresthe crisis cannot self-correct. Only about 20% of electricity bills are paid infull, driven by weak enforcement and a widespread public expectation thatelectricity should be a free public service. More than 50% of generatedelectricity is lost before billing through theft and inefficiency, and lessthan 30% of total production contributes to financial revenue, leaving onlyabout 10% of operational expenses covered by collections.

A ministry that recovers a tenth of its operating costscannot invest in the grid. A grid that cannot be invested in remainsunreliable. An industry that cannot rely on the grid cannot grow. The loop isclosed, and it has been closed for decades.

Tariff That Is Not a Tariff

Protective tariffs exist on paper for domesticmanufacturers. The government operates a Public Distribution System providingsubsidized staple foods, purchases grain harvests at above-market prices, andhas backed financing for over 1,300 industrial projects. Formally, thearchitecture of industrial protection is present.

What is also present —and what systematically neutralizesit— is the border. Cartels maintain control around Iraq's key crossing points,employing false trade invoicing whereby importers misrepresent or undervalueproducts to pay less import duty, while encouraging officials to ignoremandatory inspections. Analysts estimate that smuggling and illicit tradeactivities deprive the state of between three and four billion dollars in lostrevenue annually. A tariff that is not enforced at the point of entry is not atariff; it is an announcement.

Transparency International's 2024 Corruption PerceptionsIndex scored Iraq at 26 out of 100, against a world average of 43. The IMF, inits 2023 Article IV consultation, found that customs procedures required urgentmodernization and that anti-smuggling initiatives had not been implemented on ameaningful scale. It also recorded, without evident surprise, thatapproximately $2.5 billion was stolen from Iraq's General Commission for Taxesin 2021–22, only a fraction of which has been recovered.

The Public Distribution System, meanwhile, provides genuineshort-term relief. Research by the WFP and the IPC found that the PDS sl thetransmission of global food price shocks to Iraqi consumers, with local pricesadjusting to roughly 68% of an international price increase after five months.But the same research concluded the system strains the public budget whilefailing to provide long-term protection from global price volatility.

Political Trap

This is the argument that matters most, and the one mosteconomic reporting on Iraq consistently avoids: import dependence is not apolicy problem awaiting a technical solution. It is the equilibrium output of arentier political settlement, and every actor inside that settlement has arational interest in preserving it.

Rentier dynamics have produced deeply rooted publicexpectations of state generosity. Any attempt to cut subsidies or restructurethe payroll risks provoking popular backlash —as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadifound directly when his 2015–18 reform efforts were met with mass protests. Thegovernment distributes oil revenues not primarily to develop the economy, butto maintain social peace.

Public employment is patronage institutionalized. Subsidizedimports are a transfer payment that happens to destroy the market for domesticproducers. The arrangement works, politically, for as long as oil pricescooperate.

They are not cooperating as the oil price required tobalance Iraq's budget rose to around $84 per barrel in 2024, up from $54 in2020, as spending expanded and non-oil revenues stagnated. With oil tradingwell below that threshold, Iraq is running a structural fiscal deficit whilebeing politically unable to address its causes. Non-oil GDP was projected toslow to just 1% in 2025 as falling oil prices and financing constraints weighedon government spending and consumer sentiment.

The IMF's 2025 Article IV mission delivered its verdictwithout diplomatic softening: Iraq's vulnerabilities have increased in recentyears due to a large fiscal expansion, and the country is struggling with highunemployment, an excessive state footprint, a weak banking sector, corruption,and an inefficient electricity sector. It called for customs enforcement,tariff reform, wage bill reduction, labor market liberalization, and governanceimprovements —presenting these not as optional enhancements but as interlockingnecessities. Iraq has received versions of the same prescription, from the sameinstitution, in nearly the same language, for more than a decade.

Gas Will Keep Burning

Iraq will not resolve its import dependency through targetedsubsidies, above-market procurement prices, or financing windows for industrialprojects. These are interventions inside a system whose own logic produces theproblem they are designed to solve. The dependency will begin to close onlywhen the cost of maintaining the current settlement exceeds the cost ofdismantling it, when oil revenue falls far enough, for long enough, that thestate can no longer afford to employ a quarter of the population, subsidizeelectricity it cannot bill for, and look the other way at borders it does notcontrol.

That moment may be approaching as it has approached before—after 2014, after 2020— and passed without transformation. Whether this timeis different depends less on any particular minister or reform package than onwhether the fiscal pressure now building is severe enough to break thepolitical coalition that has made dependence the rational choice for twentyyears.

Until then, the gas will keep burning above the southernfields. The ships will keep arriving at Umm Qasr. And somewhere between theflame and the cargo hold lies the answer to a question Iraq has not yet decidedit wants to ask.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Ali al-Zaidi named Iraq's prime minister: Easy nomination, harder road ahead

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:19:31 +0000

Shafaq News- Baghdad

Ali al-Zaidi's nomination for Iraq's premiership on April 27 was, by the standards of Iraqi politics, remarkably frictionless. The Coordination Framework —the Shia political alliance that has controlled government formation since the 2021 elections— put forward a name that drew no significant objection from Sunni or Kurdish blocs, a degree of cross-communal endorsement that is rare at this stage of any Iraqi political process.

But the ease of the nomination obscures a more demanding reality: al-Zaidi now has 30 days to construct a cabinet that satisfies Iraq's entrenched sectarian power-sharing system, secure an absolute parliamentary majority —minister by minister— and do so without the political base that has anchored every prime minister before him.

The international calculations behind the nomination deserve close reading. US President Donald Trump had made clear his opposition to the return of Nouri al-Maliki, whose polarizing tenure and alleged proximity to Iran-backed networks made him unacceptable to American interlocutors. The Framework absorbed that veto without public confrontation —itself a signal of how much Iraqi political actors have internalized the need for external clearance.

The visit to Baghdad by Esmail Qaani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force and Tehran's principal operative in Iraq, came amid the nomination's momentum and was widely read in political circles as Iranian alignment. When both Washington and Tehran find a candidate acceptable, the nomination process in Baghdad tends to resolve quickly.

Yet neither capital has issued a formal position on al-Zaidi's designation. Washington is watching the incoming government through the lens of armed factions, dollar flows, and banking compliance. Tehran is assessing whether the new prime minister can preserve the existing balance of influence within the Shia house. The silence from both is, for now, a watching brief.

Al-Zaidi's profile explains the nomination's logic. Born in Dhi Qar province and in his early forties, he would be the youngest prime minister in Iraq's post-2003 history, a biographical detail that sits in sharp contrast to the political system he has been asked to navigate. He has spent his career entirely outside elected government —as chairman of Al-Watania Holding Group, a multi-sector conglomerate with operations across Iraq's southern economy, and previously as head of Al-Janoob Islamic Bank, one of Iraq's larger private financial institutions.

No party affiliation has been declared, and no office has been held at any level. His name did not circulate in the informal pre-nomination rounds through which Iraqi candidate names are typically tested. He arrived at the nomination without enemies and without allies of his own. That political anonymity was the asset that got him here. It is likely to become a liability in the weeks ahead.

The banking dimension of his profile carries a specific complication. Al-Janoob Islamic Bank was among the institutions affected by the Central Bank of Iraq's dollar-restriction measures, introduced following American pressure to limit money laundering and unauthorized use of US currency. No public record places al-Zaidi personally on any US sanctions list, but the association ensures that his banking background will face internal and external scrutiny —particularly in any future dialogue with Washington over the dollar file, financial transfers, and banking sector reform. The political clearance he received and the technical questions his record raises do not cancel each other out. They coexist, and they will surface.

The nomination itself was not a smooth internal CF decision. According to sources familiar with the process, al-Zaidi's name had appeared on an initial longlist of 29 candidates. After multiple mediation attempts failed to resolve the deadlock between al-Maliki and caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the name returned, not as a consensus triumph but as a managed exhaustion.

Sources within the Framework told Shafaq News that the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, Faeq Zaidan, played a role in advancing al-Zaidi as a settlement candidate once the dispute between the two heavyweights reached an impasse.

Qusay Mahbouba, a senior figure in al-Sudani's Reconstruction and Development coalition, gave the clearest insider reading of what the nomination represents. "Ali al-Zaidi is either a bridge for others, or he turns them into a bridge for him."

Mahbouba described the CF as having "exhausted its political and moral presence" in Iraq and declared it "practically finished, politically and morally".

Whether the Framework's fracturing opens space for new political equations, he suggested, may itself depend on whether al-Zaidi proves to have a project of his own.

That uncertainty extends beyond the CF. Shafaq News has learned that some factions and Islamist groups within the Shia environment continue to harbor reservations about the designation, objecting either to al-Zaidi's economic and banking background or to the suspicion that his selection is part of a broader settlement designed to redistribute influence within the incoming government. The welcome has been wide and not unanimous.

Iraq's government formation operates under a system known as Muhasasa —the ethno-sectarian quota distribution of state power that has governed Iraqi politics since 2003. Under this arrangement, the presidency goes to a Kurd, the speakership to a Sunni Arab, and the prime ministership to a Shia Arab. Ministries are distributed across blocs, factions, and communities according to negotiated shares. Every political actor who welcomed al-Zaidi's nomination did so with a portfolio expectation already calculated.

Article 76, Clause 4 of Iraq's 2005 constitution requires the prime minister-designate to present his cabinet and ministerial program to parliament within 30 days of his assignment, meaning by approximately May 28. Parliament then votes on ministers individually, alongside the program, requiring an absolute majority of 165 votes from a 329-seat chamber. A bloc can approve the cabinet in principle while withholding support for a specific minister, using that threat as leverage until its share is secured. This has happened before, and it will be the operating logic of the coming weeks.

The cabinet's size will itself be a political indicator. Iraq's ministerial rosters have ranged from 32 portfolios under Ibrahim al-Jaafari in 2005 to 44 under al-Maliki's second government in 2010, a figure that reflected the price of assembling a coalition when competing demands could not be resolved within a smaller structure. The current baseline, established under al-Sudani, is 23 ministries —reached through negotiation, with each portfolio assigned to a faction, a community, or a regional interest. Al-Zaidi inherits that map and faces pressure to redraw it upward if the demands of his coalition cannot be resolved within it.

A prime minister with a political base has instruments to resist that pressure. Al-Maliki could threaten, and al-Sudani could leverage the CF's machinery. However, al-Zaidi has no comparable leverage. His authority derives entirely from the consensus that produced him, a consensus built on the absence of political weight, not its presence. If the CF's internal factions present incompatible ministry demands, he has no independent standing from which to arbitrate. He will either accommodate or deadlock.

One asset that does not appear in his official biography may yet prove consequential, and its limits have already been defined. Sources describe al-Zaidi as maintaining a personal relationship with the leadership of the Patriotic Shiite Movement, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, whose withdrawal from the political arena in 2021 did not remove him from influence.

A senior PSM official, speaking to Shafaq News on condition of anonymity, confirmed the relationship but was unambiguous about its boundaries. "A personal and social relationship does exist between the movement's leadership and al-Zaidi," the official said, "but does not amount to an endorsement of his candidacy or formal backing for his premiership bid." The movement, he added, has maintained its boycott of political activity with no covert contacts or understandings reached with any domestic or foreign party regarding government formation.

In a government whose Shia base is fractured, even a relationship that stops short of endorsement carries a certain weight, but building any political calculation on it would be, by the movement's own account, a misreading.

Kurdish blocs —primarily the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan— will press for their traditional presidential allocation and for resolution of chronic disputes over Kirkuk's administrative status and the Kurdistan Region's federal budget share.

Sunni factions, concentrated in Iraq's western and central provinces, will seek the interior or defense portfolio, or both. These are structural requirements of any viable coalition, and they compete directly with Shia factional claims on the same portfolios.

The coming 30 days will test whether the Muhasasa calculus resolves within the constitutional deadline, and whether the international actors whose silent approval enabled the nomination apply sustained pressure to ensure it does.

Domestic, regional, and international acceptance got al-Zaidi to the door, but what happens next depends on whether a prime minister chosen precisely because he belongs to no one can govern effectively once he must distribute power among everyone.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Who is Ali Al-Zaidi? The businessman tapped for Iraq's premiership

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:05:10 +0000

Shafaq News- Baghdad

Ali Faleh Kazem Al-Zaidi, the figure nominated by the ShiiteCoordination Framework for the position of Iraqi prime minister, has built hiscareer almost entirely outside the structures of elected government.

Born in Dhi Qar province in southern Iraq and in hisearly forties, Al-Zaidi holds bachelor's degrees in law and in finance andbanking, along with a postgraduate degree in the same field. Membership in theIraqi Bar Association connects him formally to the legal profession, though nopublic-sector practice has been recorded.

The bulk of his professional life has unfolded in theprivate sector. As chairman of the board of Al-Watania Holding Group, amulti-sector conglomerate, he sits among Iraq's more influential businessfigures without being among its publicly recognizable ones. Before that, thechairmanship of Al-Janoob Islamic Bank —one of Iraq's larger private financialinstitutions— along with leadership roles at Al-Shaab University and the IshtarMedical Institute, traced a trajectory across banking, higher education, andhealth training that has remained, throughout, at a remove from electoralpolitics.

No political office has been held at any level ofgovernment. No party affiliation has been declared. Notably, his name did notsurface in the rounds of formal and informal negotiation that typically precedea Coordination Framework nomination —a process in which candidate namesgenerally circulate and are tested publicly before any official move is made.

For the first time, the Coordination Framework, whichhas held the dominant role in Iraqi government formation since the 2021elections, put forward a figure with no recorded involvement in politicalnegotiations. Sunni and Kurdish political blocs have both welcomed thenomination, a degree of cross-communal endorsement that is uncommon at thisstage of Iraqi government formation.

What brought Al-Zaidi to the Framework's attention,and on whose initiative, has not been confirmed by any official source. Whatthe record shows is a career constructed in the private sector, with nodocumented footprint in the political processes that define how Iraqigovernments are formed.

Discover Iraq: Saladin Province’s long road to recovery after ISIS

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:22:04 +0000

Shafaq News

A journey through Saladin province —from Tikrit and Samarrato Baiji— exploring how history, identity, and post-ISIS recovery are reshapingdaily life in central Iraq.

Saladin, named after the great Muslim leader Salah al-Dinal-Ayyubi, is both a symbol and a reality: a province shaped by empire, faith,and resilience. Spanning more than 24,000 square kilometers, it connectsBaghdad to the north, acting as a bridge between Iraq’s central heartlands andits northern provinces.

Its landscapes range from the fertile Tigris floodplains tothe rugged Hamrin and Makhoul ranges, forming a natural corridor for trade,migration, and history. Archaeological sites in Tikrit and Samarra point tocivilizations that thrived long before Islam. Samarra, with its spiral Malwiyaminaret and Abbasid palace ruins, served as a ninth-century hub of learning andpower, attracting scholars, poets, and engineers.

The province’s identity remains closely intertwined with itsnamesake. Salah al-Din’s legacy —justice, unity, and moral authority— continuesto resonate with residents. Through the Ottoman and modern periods, Saladinmaintained its agricultural wealth and tribal influence. Tikrit producedmilitary officers and politicians who shaped Iraq’s modern history; underSaddam Hussein, the province occupied a central, if controversial, role innational affairs.

The fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003 plunged the provinceinto insurgency and later ISIS occupation. Cities such as Tikrit and Baiji wereleft in ruins. Today, a steady process of recovery is unfolding. Schools,homes, and marketplaces have reopened, demonstrating that Saladin is not aprovince in decline but one defined by endurance.

Neighbors Before Sects

Saladin’s population of roughly 1.6–1.8 million forms amosaic of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunnis, and Shias. Arabic is the dominantlanguage, though Kurdish and Turkmen are commonly spoken in Tuz Khurmatu andthe northeastern districts. Sunnis hold majorities in Tikrit, Samarra, andBaiji, while Shia communities are concentrated in Balad and Dujail. Samarra,home to the eleventh Shia Imam, Mohammad bin Hassan Al-Askari Shrine, remains asacred site, drawing pilgrims from across Iraq and Iran.

The province’s diversity has brought both challenges andresilience. Markets, mosques, and schools convey a quiet ethos: “neighborsbefore sects.” Tribal networks continue to play a central role in localgovernance. The Jubur, al-Bu Nasir, Ubayd, and al-Dulaym tribes mediatedisputes and uphold social order in areas where the state’s presence islimited.

Tikrit serves as the administrative and educational center,while Samarra combines commerce with spiritual significance. Baiji and Baladsustain a balance of industrial and agricultural activity. Rural villages, longscarred by war and displacement, are gradually returning to life. Farmers adaptto damaged irrigation systems, and families rebuild their homes. Residentsidentify as ‘’Ahl al-Nahr’’ —people of the river— reflecting their enduringconnection to the Tigris.

Oil Meets Dust

Saladin’s terrain presents both opportunities and challengesas the Tigris irrigates farmland, supports cities, and sustains livelihoods. Tothe east, the Hamrin Mountains harbor minerals and fragile forests, while tothe west, semi-desert plains stretch toward al-Anbar province.

The province experiences a continental climate, withscorching summers above 45°C, cool winters, and most rainfall between Novemberand March. Water scarcity remains, as almost the whole of Iraq, a persistentconcern. Agriculture dominates local life, with wheat, barley, corn,vegetables, dates, cotton, and livestock forming the backbone ofproduction. Recurring droughts, damagedirrigation networks, and rising soil salinity continue to threaten yields.

Beneath the surface, oil and gas remain strategic resources.The Baiji Refinery, once Iraq’s largest, processed over 300,000 barrels daily.The Ajeel and Allas oil fields have resumed activity, while phosphate depositsprovide further economic potential.

Environmental pressures persist, including desertification,reduced Tigris flow, industrial pollution, and deforestation, all intensifiedover recent decades. Yet farmers maintain traditional water-sharing practicesand crop rotation, sustaining livelihoods through knowledge passed down acrossgenerations.

Rising from Ruins

Industry in Saladin revolves around oil. The partialrestoration of the Baiji Refinery provides employment and supports economicstability, while the Ajeel and Allas fields contribute to energy output. Tradehas revived along the Baghdad–Mosul corridor, and Tikrit’s markets bustle withactivity.

Infrastructure, however, remains uneven. Electricity supplyis inconsistent, schools and hospitals are often overcrowded, and many roadsare under repair. Despite these challenges, progress is evident compared to thedevastation following the ISIS occupation.

Education plays a central role in the province’s recovery.The University of Tikrit and Samarra University host tens of thousands ofstudents. The faculties of medicine, engineering, and agriculture train thenext generation tasked with rebuilding Saladin. Schools and vocational programsin rural areas complement urban institutions, linking recovery to opportunity.

Verse and Veneration

Saladin’s culture blends historical grandeur, religioussignificance, and contemporary creativity. Samarra’s al-Askari Shrine andAbbasid monuments serve as both sacred sites and cultural anchors, attractingartisans, pilgrims, and historians.

Cultural life thrives despite adversity with Tikrit hostspoetry readings, art exhibitions, and music performances, often exploringthemes of war, displacement, and return. Universities function as culturalhubs, fostering research, debate, and heritage preservation. Tribal traditions,oral storytelling, mawwal poetry, and music continue in weddings and religiousfestivals, linking communities to their past.

Future Is Now

Saladin faces structural challenges across reconstruction,economic diversification, social healing, and environmental stress. Thousandsof homes, schools, and roads remain under repair, while bureaucratic delays andlimited support from Baghdad complicate progress.

Economic reliance on oil and agriculture leaves the provincevulnerable. Emerging solar energy projects, small-scale industries, andlogistics ventures offer new avenues for growth. Environmental pressures—including drought, reduced Tigris flow, and desertification— demand urgentadaptation.

In addition, areas once under ISIS control continue toexperience mistrust between sects and tribes. Dialogue programs, tribalmediation, and community initiatives are gradually restoring trust.

Despite these hurdles, signs of optimism are visible. Youngengineers develop low-cost housing solutions, students document heritagerestoration, and women-led cooperatives revive traditional crafts for export.Each initiative reflects a province not only surviving but striving toward asustainable and diversified future.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Rooted in soil: An Iraqi farmer holds on as the land changes

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:20:20 +0000

Shafaq News- Najaf

At 77, Abu Thaer still walks his fields in Najaf’s al-Mishkhab district with the same quiet discipline that has defined his life since childhood. For more than six decades, the land has been his routine, his memory, and his measure of time. Today, it also carries a growing sense of loss.

“The agriculture today is not what it used to be,” he noted, standing among rows that once promised certainty. “We had everything, fertilizers, water, support. Now it has all become weaker.”

Across Iraq, farmers face mounting pressure from water shortages, declining state backing, and environmental strain that has reshaped the rhythm of rural life. What was once predictable has become fragile.

Yet for Abu Thaer, leaving is not an option. “I would rather stay here than go to the city,” he said with a steady voice. “Even if they gave me a palace, I would not leave this land.”

Besides his sons, he continues to cultivate dozens of dunams, holding on to a way of life that feels increasingly out of step with the present. Each season carries both hope and uncertainty.

In al-Mishkhab, wheat fields are beginning to form ears, with grains slowly filling -early signs that this year’s harvest could bring relief if conditions remain stable. For a moment, the fields echo something of the past.

Government measures have attempted to support that possibility. Months ago, the Ministry of Agriculture moved to restrict imports of certain agricultural and livestock products, aiming to protect local production and prevent disease outbreaks, in line with seasonal output. But for farmers like Abu Thaer, policy alone cannot restore what has been lost. The changes run deeper, etched into the soil, and seasons themselves.

Human touch over laser: Erbil artisan keeps gold craftsmanship authentic

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:08:17 +0000

Shafaq News- Erbil

Erbil’s gold market carries a quiet glow, where rows ofsmall shops showcase a long tradition of craftsmanship developed overgenerations. Inside one workshop, Yahya Arbili works carefully, shaping metalinto pieces defined by Arabic calligraphy.

Arbili is more than a traditional goldsmith; he blendsgoldsmithing and calligraphy to create handmade pieces that deliver a humantouch rather than machine precision.

Speaking to Shafaq News, he explained that each piece begins“from zero” using simple tools. “The first stage starts by writing therequested text by hand,” he continued, pointing out that the script depends onthe customer’s preferred style before being transferred onto a sheet of gold.

Precision remains essential throughout the process. Thefollowing stage involves piercing work with a manual saw, following the curvesof the letters cut from the gold. The work demands patience and calm andconcludes with polishing that completes the final shine.

Despite the spread of electronic devices and laser machinesin goldsmithing, Arbili relies entirely on manual work. He believes machinesdiminish the artistic value of the craft. “I do not use electronic devices,” hemaintains, adding that handmade work helps preserve authenticity.

This type of work appeals to a specific group rather than abroad market. Most of his clients are “intellectuals and people interested inthe arts,” who understand the value of handmade work and the beauty of Arabiccalligraphy.

Prices vary depending on the weight of the gold, with Arbiliestimating they usually charge “$200 or more” for manual work, with most piecesweighing between one and two mithqals, or 5 to 10 grams.

Arbili sustains his work from his small workshop in Erbil,preserving a traditional craft that merges material value with artisticexpression. For him, the true worth of gold lies not only in its price, but inthe skill, patience, and creativity used to shape it.

Twenty-three years on: Iraq got what the 2003 invasion produced

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:16:22 +0000

Shafaq News- Baghdad

On April 9, 2003, American tanks rolledinto the heart of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein's statue fell. What followed—twenty-three years of political turbulence, economic dependency, sectarianfracture, and institutional fragility— is often described as a failure ofreconstruction.

The first and most consequential decisioncame within weeks of the invasion. US Administrator Paul Bremer dissolved theIraqi Army, dismissed the ministries of Defense and Interior, and putapproximately 400,000 trained soldiers on the street without income, purpose,or a state to serve.

Military expert Ali al-Maamari, speaking toShafaq News, does not reach for diplomatic language to describe what followed.Bremer's decision, he says, "was unjust" —it left Iraq in a state ofsecurity anxiety and instability, directly enabling the rise of armed groups,sectarian terror, and ethnic fragmentation. The vacuum did not stay empty asAl-Qaeda and ISIS filled it.

The competition, rather than cohesion,replaced the old order, fracturing it along the deepest available fault lines.Fahd al-Jubouri, a senior figure in the Al-Hikma Movement led by Ammar al-Hakimand a member of the Shiite Coordination Framework (CF), the dominant bloc inIraqi politics, describes the post-2003 transition as moving from "arepressive dictatorial system to an unregulated democracy" that generatedcontinuous crises.

Over six electoral cycles, Iraqis chosetheir representatives. But the act of voting did not dissolve the divisions thenew system had organized itself around —it institutionalized them.

Al-Jubouri puts it plainly: a portion ofthe Iraqi people lost their national identity. In its place rose sectarian,ethnic, and partisan identities, visible everywhere, and nowhere more toxicallythan on social media, where political disagreement collapsed into accusation.

One person is dismissed as a nationalist,while another is labeled a traitor or a foreign agent. The vocabulary ofnational debate became the vocabulary of mutual delegitimization. "We arenow in the middle of the road, trying to write the basic equation: a state thatsponsors and takes responsibility for every detail," al-Jubouri says.

Whether that equation gets written depends,he argues, on whether forces that benefit from a weak state can be contained.

The economy followed its own version of thesame logic. Economist Mustafa al-Faraj describes the post-2003 transition as amove from one form of dependency to another. Iraq exchanged the constraints ofinternational embargo for near-total reliance on oil, which now accounts forroughly 90 percent of government revenue and 95 percent of exports, accordingto World Bank and IMF estimates.

Youth unemployment approaches 30 percent.Public sector salaries and pensions consume more than half of national spending—a pattern the World Bank has repeatedly flagged as unsustainable.

The import liberalization that followed theinvasion compounded the problem in ways that receive less attention than theydeserve. Al-Faraj considered that opening the market "whetted the appetiteof traders and neighboring countries at the expense of the localproducer."

With the agriculture hollowed out and theindustry stalled, the public sector expanded to absorb labor that a productiveeconomy would have generated differently.

Iraq sits on some of the world's largestproven oil reserves and cannot reliably power its own cities, having spent morethan $80 billion on electricity infrastructure since 2003, according to theMinistry of Electricity, with daily shortages still the norm.

The media landscape underwent its owntransformation, expansive in form, contested in substance. Media academicHaidar Shallal describes the shift from a single state broadcaster to afragmented ecosystem of more than 100 satellite channels and hundreds of radiooutlets as genuine but incomplete.

The technology created space; professionaland regulatory frameworks did not keep pace. The new emergence, Shallal argues,became "an arena of conflict between political, religious, and socialforces" rather than a public sphere.

Iraq now ranks 155th globally in pressfreedom, according to Reporters Without Borders, which has recorded more than340 journalist deaths in the country over three decades —the highest of anycity worldwide for Baghdad. Shallal's prescription is spare and pointed: Iraqneeds media that "calms souls rather than terrifies them."

Zooming out from the domestic, politicalscience professor Issam al-Feyli of Al-Mustansiriya University places 2003within a longer geopolitical rupture. The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, hepointed out, was "the beginning of the New Middle East project" —onewhose consequences extended far beyond Iraq's borders, contributing to thepeaceful collapse of other regional governments, enabling expanded Israelidiplomatic presence across the Arab world, and draining the economic capacityof states through sustained internal conflict.

Al-Feyli draws the comparison explicitly:what 2003 set in motion rivals the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 in itsreordering of the regional map.

Twenty-three years on, Iraq is neithercollapsed nor consolidated. Its institutions function under strain. Itspolitics are active and divided, while its oil wealth is real and insufficientto substitute for a functioning economy. The events of April 2003 did remove adictator, but also removed the architecture of a state and replaced it withconditions that produced, reliably and logically, everything that followed.

Iraq, understood on its own terms, raises aharder question: given those conditions, what could realistically havesucceeded?

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

The Shiite Coordination Framework: Can govern Iraq, but cannot agree on a prime minister

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:55:06 +0000

Shafaq News (Updated on May 03, at 20:00)

Four daysbefore a constitutional deadline that could tip Iraq's government formationinto legal crisis, the Shiite Coordination Framework —the largest bloc in thecountry's 329-seat parliament— has failed repeatedly to agree on a candidatefor prime minister. The meetings were derailed by numbers that look decisive onpaper and are paralyzed in practice.

The Frameworkholds 162 seats, nearly half of parliament, enough to claim the premiershipdesignation under Iraq's post-2003 power-sharing system. Under that system, theprime minister is not elected by parliament but designated by whichevercoalition can credibly claim the status of largest bloc, making the CF'sinternal selection process the real decision, and the subsequent parliamentaryconfidence vote its ratification.

In practice,those 162 seats are distributed across two internally competing power centerswhose interests diverge sharply enough that no combination of arguments,incentives, or face-saving formulas has yet produced a majority willing tocommit to a single name.

Thatratification, however, is not guaranteed. A designated prime minister stillrequires the support of Sunni and Kurdish blocs to secure a parliamentaryconfidence vote. A candidate who arrives at that threshold withoutcross-community backing, regardless of how he was designated, cannot form agovernment. The internal CF contest and the broader parliamentary landscape aretherefore inseparable, and the numbers across both arenas matter.

Under Article76 of the Iraqi constitution, the Framework has until April 26 to formallypresent its nominee to President Nizar Amedi, who was elected by parliament onApril 11. The nominee then has 30 days to form a government and secureparliamentary confidence. Each day the Framework spends in a failed session isa day subtracted from that window, and a signal to Iraq's partners, creditors,and regional neighbors that the caretaker government of Mohammed Shia al-Sudanimay be managing the country's affairs for considerably longer than anyoneformally acknowledges.

The 162-SeatFiction

The Frameworkdeclared itself the largest parliamentary bloc following the November 2025elections and claimed the premiership designation on that basis. Thedeclaration was procedurally correct. What it obscured is that the 162 seats itclaimed are not a unified political force, but an institutional label appliedto two categories of parties whose common ground begins and ends with Shiiteidentity.

The firstcategory, parties with active armed wings inside the Popular MobilizationForces, accounts for 59 of those seats. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Iran-alignedparamilitary force that has since entered formal politics through its Sadiqoonmovement, holds 27. The Badr Organization of Hadi al-Amiri holds 21. KataibHezbollah's political wing, Hoqooq, and Kataib Imam Ali's Khadamat movement addsix and five, respectively. These blocs operate under a dual logic —parliamentarypresence and armed capability— that gives them leverage inside the CFdisproportionate to their seat count alone.

The secondcategory, CF members without armed wings, holds the Framework's numericalmajority at 103 seats. Caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani'sReconstruction and Development coalition, the election's largest single winnerwith 46 seats, anchors this group. Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition,which holds 29 seats and carries the Framework's formal nomination for the premiership,sits alongside Ammar al-Hakim's Al-Hikma Alliance with 18, and two smallerparties —Tasmeem and Abshir Ya Iraq— with six and four seats respectively.

The distinctionbetween these two categories matters more than the CF's aggregate figuresuggests. The “civilian majority” within the Framework is theoreticallydominant. It is also the most fractured half, because civilian partiescalculate in terms of governance costs, international legitimacy, and cabinetportfolios, while the armed-wing blocs calculate in terms of PMF autonomy andinstitutional control of the security sector.

The Calculus OfDeadlock

The Frameworkformally nominated al-Maliki on January 24 by majority vote, not by theconsensus that had governed previous nomination rounds. That proceduralfracture signaled from the outset that his bid lacked the internal cohesion aconfidence vote would eventually require.

Four dayslater, US President Donald Trump publicly rejected the nomination, threateningto cut Washington's support for Baghdad if al-Maliki returned to power. TheAmerican position hardened further when US Envoy Tom Barrack visited Baghdadand conveyed the objection through diplomatic channels directly to Iraqipolitical leaders.

Al-Maliki didnot withdraw. His camp argued that the nomination was a collective CF decisionrather than a personal ambition, and that any change of course must come fromwithin the Framework itself. That framing —institutional loyalty as a shieldagainst external pressure — has held his position in place even as the internalbalance has shifted steadily against him.

The seat counttells the story with unusual clarity. Al-Maliki's committed coalition spansthree communities but remains numerically modest: his own State of Law with 29seats, Al-Azm alliance leader Muthanna al-Samarrai's Sunni bloc with 15, andthe Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani with 26. The KDP welcomed hisnomination publicly and concluded a reciprocal arrangement, even if notpublicly, under which al-Maliki's forces would back the KDP's presidentialcandidate, Foreign Minister Fouad Hussein.

Thatarrangement collapsed on April 11 when parliament elected the Patriotic Unionof Kurdistan's candidate Nizar Amedi as president, leaving the KDP without itsside of the bargain and al-Maliki without his most significant non-Shiitebacker.

The forcesaligned against al-Maliki's personal bid command significantly greaterparliamentary weight, even if they do not always agree on an alternative.Al-Sudani's Reconstruction and Development coalition holds 46 seats. TheSadiqoon movement of Qais al-Khazali and the Al-Hikma Alliance of Ammaral-Hakim, whose positions have converged around resistance to al-Malikispecifically, together contribute 45. Mohammed al-Halbousi's Taqadum party, thelargest Sunni force with 33 seats, had already rejected al-Maliki's nominationbefore Trump's statement, grounding its opposition in domestic politicalrivalry rather than American pressure. The PUK's 15 seats, anchored by itsApril 11 presidential victory, sit firmly in the anti-al-Maliki camp.

BadrOrganization leader Hadi al-Amiri's 21 seats remain formally neutral —the mostconsequential undeclared position in the entire negotiation.

The combinedweight of forces either opposed to al-Maliki or uncommitted to him exceeds 160seats across all communities. His committed base sits at roughly 70. The gapbetween those two figures is a structural verdict. What has kept al-Maliki'sposition alive is not numbers but leverage: his ability to deny the CF theinternal consensus it needs to formally displace him, and the absence of achallenger whom all opposing factions can agree to support.

That absencehas produced the current impasse. The Framework scheduled a decisive meetingfor last Saturday, postponed it to Monday, and watched Monday's session endwithout resolution. Wednesday's attempt was similarly postponed to Friday, andApril 26 is now four days away.

The MechanismDebate

Inside the failedsessions, two voting proposals have emerged as the Framework's attempt to breakits own impasse, according to sources who spoke to Shafaq News.

The first wouldrequire any nominee to secure an absolute majority of CF members —a thresholdof roughly 82 of 162 seats. Neither al-Maliki nor al-Sudani reaches that figurefrom his own bloc alone, making the outcome dependent on which man can pullBadr, Hoqooq, Khadamat, and the smaller parties into his column.

The secondproposal links the selection to the parliamentary weight of blocs backing eachcontender, with the winning candidate required to surpass a two-thirdsthreshold within the Framework's leadership structure, equivalent toapproximately 10 leadership votes. This shifts the contest from seat counts toinstitutional seniority, a terrain where al-Maliki's longer roots inside the CFmachinery could offset his numerical disadvantage.

Both leadershave reportedly agreed that one of these mechanisms should govern the outcome.The agreement on process, however, masks a disagreement on proxy candidatesthat may prove equally difficult to resolve.

Al-Maliki'scamp has advanced Bassem al-Badri, chair of the Accountability and JusticeCommission, as a compromise figure. Al-Sudani's coalition has put forward Ihsanal-Awadi, director of the caretaker prime minister's office. Thirty lawmakersfrom al-Sudani's own bloc have threatened to withdraw their support if al-Awadiis nominated —a signal of the factional tension running even within what shouldbe the Framework's dominant force.

Sources withinthe Framework told Shafaq News that if divisions persist, discussions may shifttoward a third figure with political and administrative experience capable ofaddressing security, economic, and governance challenges while maintaininginternational acceptance. Caretaker Health Minister Saleh al-Hasnawi has beenfloated as one such name.

The PMF'sinstitutional status has emerged as a parallel sticking point in the cabinetportfolio negotiations. Armed-wing blocs are demanding that the PMF'sdesignation as an independent body be preserved in any government formationagreement, a condition that directly shapes Washington's assessment of the nextprime minister's willingness to constrain Iranian-aligned forces.

The External Ceiling

What theinternal CF sessions have not fully absorbed is that the room where thedesignation is nominally being made is not the only room where it is actuallybeing decided.

The commanderof Iran's Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, completed a covert multi-day visit toBaghdad —his presence, as is customary, unannounced until after the fact. Hedeparted, leaving his deputy behind to monitor two parallel files: the statusof Iraqi armed groups in the event of an Iran-US agreement, and the governmentformation process itself. The dual mandate of that deputy's presence reflectsTehran's consistent position: the PM selection and the broader regionalnegotiation are not separate files.

In a messageissued after his departure, Qaani stated that forming a government is "apurely Iraqi right," adding that "Iraq is too great for others tointerfere in its affairs" —a formulation that pointedly referenced what hedescribed as "perpetrators of crimes against humanity," understood asa reference to the United States. The statement publicly disavowed the veryinfluence his presence was understood to be exercising. Most politicalobservers in Baghdad read the visit itself as the signal, and the departingwords as its diplomatic cover.

Theconsequences of that visit became visible shortly after. The CF was on theverge of naming al-Badri on Friday evening, with a Saturday session expected toconfirm the choice. Subsequent developments —never formally identified by anyparty— unraveled an agreement that had appeared settled, sending thenine-candidate contest back to its starting point.

Washington'smove is expected next. US Envoy Tom Barrack is anticipated to visit Baghdadimminently. The two visits —Qaani's concluded and Barrack's forthcoming— arethe decisive external inputs that will shape Iraq's next political phase.

What TheNumbers Cannot Resolve

The trajectoryof the current negotiation points toward one of four outcomes, each carryingdistinct consequences for Iraq's political architecture.

The first is anal-Maliki premiership. It remains constitutionally possible since he holds theCF's formal nomination, commands a committed cross-community coalition ofroughly 70 seats, and has not withdrawn despite sustained internal and externalpressure. His camp's strategy is not to win the internal CF numbers —he cannot—but to outlast the opposition's ability to coalesce around a singlealternative.

Behind thatstrategy sits an implicit endorsement from Tehran, whose preference foral-Maliki as a known and institutionally reliable quantity has been visiblethroughout the formation process. However, what al-Maliki cannot overcome isthe American, and the parliamentary confidence vote that follows any CFdesignation would require cross-community support that his current coalitioncannot deliver. His 70-seat committed base falls critically short of themajority he would need, particularly given the public distance maintained bySunni and Kurdish blocs that have either explicitly rejected his return or quietlywithheld their backing.

The second is asecond term for Al-Sudani, secured through the internal CF voting mechanismonce al-Maliki's bid is formally exhausted. This is the outcome the seatdistribution most clearly supports.

Al-Sudanicommands the largest single bloc, enjoys tacit backing from al-Hakim andal-Khazali, faces no American veto, and demonstrated through his caretakertenure a capacity to manage the competing pressures of Washington and Tehranwithout forcing either into open confrontation. He also carries thecross-community support that a confidence vote requires —the April 11presidential session demonstrated that the coalition holds under pressure. Asecond Al-Sudani term would represent continuity dressed as resolution, theCF's nominal nominee displaced by its numerical reality.

The third is acompromise figure —al-Badri, al-Awadi, al-Hasnawi, or another name whoseprimary qualification is the absence of committed enemies. This outcome wouldresolve the immediate impasse while deferring its underlying causes. A primeminister without a political base of his own would govern through negotiateddependency on the blocs that installed him, meaning the CF's internal fracturewould be managed rather than resolved.

Externalpressure shapes this scenario as directly as it does the others. Any compromisefigure must clear two external thresholds simultaneously: Washington'sacceptance, which rules out anyone perceived as an Iranian instrument, andTehran's tolerance, which rules out anyone perceived as a reformist threat toPMF institutional autonomy.

The fourth, andconstitutionally most precarious, outcome is a failure to meet the April 26limit, forcing a legal and political reckoning over what happens when Iraq'slargest bloc cannot exercise the designation it claims. The Federal SupremeCourt's 2010 ruling on the largest bloc created the legal ground within whichthis contest is being fought. Whether that architecture contains a mechanismfor resolving a CF impasse that crosses the constitutional threshold is amatter Iraqi legal scholars have not been required to address until now.

A bloc thatcannot agree on a candidate across multiple failed sessions is not simplyexperiencing political friction. It is revealing, in real time, the limits of apower-sharing system designed to distribute influence rather than concentrateit, and that has never developed a mechanism for resolving the conflicts thatdistribution inevitably produces.

Written andedited by Shafaq News staff.

Budgeting for baby: Financial strain cools Iraq’s birth rate

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:05:38 +0000

Shafaq News

In today’sIraq, having a child is no longer a matter of tradition or personal desirealone; it has become a calculation shaped by survival. Families once proud oftheir size now face an unforgiving reality: rising rents, unstable jobs, andthe relentless cost of living have turned marriage and childbirth intohigh-risk decisions. What was once guided by custom is now weighed againstuncertainty, forcing Iraqis to reconsider what family life means.

According tothe 2024 national census, Iraq’s population stands at about 46.1 million, witha median age of 20.8 years, one of the youngest in the region. Yet behind theheadline number, a quieter shift is underway: the Iraqi family size isshrinking.

The changeshows up in the fertility numbers. Iraq’s fertility rate has fallen to roughly3.3 children per woman, down from historical levels that exceeded seven. Whilestill high by global standards, the decline reflects a broader transformationin how Iraqi families plan their futures, especially in urban areas wherehousing, healthcare, and education are more expensive and where the informaleconomy leaves incomes uncertain.

A NoticeableSlowdown

Officialfigures and expert assessments increasingly treat the trend as structuralrather than anecdotal. Earlier, the Ministry of Planning spokesman Abdul ZahraAl-Hindawi described a clear drop in the annual population growth rate: itstood at over 3% in 2012, but has since eased to about 2.5%.

Speaking toour agency, Al-Hindawi linked the decline to rising education levels andeconomic pressure, particularly among women. He argued that education reshapesfamily size by increasing awareness of family planning and tying childbirthdecisions more closely to income stability and living conditions.

As morewomen pursue higher education and seek employment, childbirth is no longerassumed to follow marriage automatically. Couples, especially in urban areas,now space pregnancies and invest more heavily in healthcare, education, andhousing for fewer children. The shift reflects not only changing values butalso a narrowing room for economic error.

The 2024census also reinforced the scale of urbanization: about 70.17% of Iraq’spopulation lives in urban areas, compared with 29.83% in rural settings. Urbanlife compresses budgets into fixed monthly costs that leave little space forlarge families to absorb shocks, particularly when incomes are irregular.

Price ofLife

Economistsargued that Iraq’s fertility decline cannot be separated from its economicstruggles. Economic expert Ahmad Abdul Rabbo pointed out how population trendsincreasingly mirror financial pressure across households: housing, education,and healthcare costs have risen steadily, turning each additional child into along-term economic commitment many families feel unable to bear.

A key driveris the labor market, not only whether jobs exist, but whether those jobs offerstability. Available indicators from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairsshowed that Iraq’s overall unemployment is around 15.5% in 2024, reflectingpersistent pressure even after years of oil-driven public spending cycles.

The strainis sharper among the young, the very cohort that typically drives marriage andchildbirth. Youth unemployment (ages 15–24) has recently approached 32%, alevel that delays family formation and extends financial dependence. Whenearnings are uncertain, couples postpone marriage and childbirth, structuringfamily life around economic survival.

Quality overQuota

For manyIraqi families, fertility decisions now reflect a steady reckoning withvulnerability. Income poverty adds a decisive layer to this calculation. AWorld Bank poverty brief placed Iraq’s national poverty rate at 17.5% in 2024—a modest decline from earlier estimates, but still a reflection of millions ofhouseholds living close to the edge.

Even whereindicators show incremental improvement, the lived reality remains fragile. Inthat environment, family size becomes one of the few levers couples feel theycan still control.

Speaking toShafaq News, Enas Saleh remembered that she and her husband once planned tohave a second child soon after their first. Rising expenses quickly forced arethink. “A child now needs a salary of their own,” she explained, pointing tothe physical exhaustion and emotional strain of balancing childcare with work.

HassanKhaled, a father of two, challenges an older belief that “a newborn bringstheir own sustenance.” Family life today, he argued, requires planning ratherthan reliance on fate.

Thesepersonal calculations reflect a deeper transformation in the meaning ofparenthood itself. Manahil Al-Saleh, a psychology researcher, observed thatparents today shoulder far heavier emotional and educational responsibilitiesthan previous generations. Children grow up surrounded by screens, rapid socialchange, and rising expectations —conditions that demand constant attention,supervision, and guidance.

Parentingnow demands far more than previous generations could imagine, in money, time,and emotional labor. When economic pressure limits parents’ ability to providethat care, the consequences extend beyond individual households, riskinggenerations less equipped to navigate social and economic stress.

This strainis further shaped by Iraq’s unequal labor landscape. Female labor forceparticipation stands at around 10.6%, compared with about 68% for men,according to an International Labour Organization (ILO) report based on Iraq’slabor force survey. Low participation constrains household income potential ata moment of rising costs, while social and structural barriers often place thebulk of caregiving on women.

Familiesthus face a persistent trade-off: when women work, childcare becomes difficultwithout reliable support; when women do not, households are more exposed toincome shocks. Within this squeeze, many parents increasingly opt for “qualityover quantity,” directing limited resources toward fewer children in hopes ofsecuring better education, healthcare, housing, and emotional stability.

Fertilitydecline, in this sense, is less a rejection of family than an expression ofcare —a cautious attempt to shield children from a future that feelsincreasingly uncertain.

Policywithout Protection

Vulnerabilitiesdo not look the same everywhere, and geography continues to shape how Iraqifamilies experience economic pressure and how they respond to it.

PreviousShafaq News coverage of demographic trends showed that southern provinces suchas Karbala, Najaf, and Dhi Qar tend to record slightly higher fertilitypatterns than other parts of the country. These variations reflected familiardynamics: local job markets, differing costs of living, and uneven access topublic services influence household choices in different ways.

Yet acrossthe world, one constant persists. In many countries facing fertility decline,including Japan, South Korea, and Italy, governments attempt to cushionfamilies through childcare subsidies, housing assistance, and maternity orparental benefits. In Iraq, however, comparable support remains limited,fragmented, or difficult to access. Family formation, therefore, continues tooperate largely as a private economic calculation rather than a shared socialproject.

The statemay speak in broad terms about population planning, but households confront thecost of raising children long before encountering any tangible state response.This gap helps explain the depth of today’s parental anxiety: the pressurefamilies feel is not only personal; it is systemic.

FutureUnbound

Iraq’sslowing population growth does not, by itself, amount to a crisis. It is betterunderstood as a signal, one that points to economic pressures quietly reshapinghow Iraqis approach marriage, childbirth, and family life.

Over time,these shifts are likely to leave lasting marks on the country’s social fabric.Later marriage and delayed childbirth may gradually become the norm,particularly in urban areas where housing shortages, high rents, and unstableincomes make early family formation increasingly difficult.

Smallerfamilies could alter traditional systems of intergenerational support. In acountry where extended families have long served as informal safety nets, fewerchildren mean fewer hands to share care for the elderly, absorb financialshocks, or support relatives during periods of hardship.

At the sametime, expectations surrounding children continue to rise. Parents increasinglymeasure success not simply by having children, but by whether they can securequality education, stable employment, and real prospects for upward mobility.When the labor market fails to absorb growing numbers of young people, thoseexpectations risk turning into frustration, for both parents and youth.

For thestate, the latest census provides more than a statistical snapshot. It offers arare opportunity to plan, but also poses a direct test: can Iraq translatedemographic clarity into policies that reduce household risk? Without reformsthat expand job creation, ease access to housing, strengthen social protection,and lower the hidden costs of raising children, current trends are likely todeepen.

More Iraqiswill delay marriage, limit family size, and structure their lives aroundeconomic survival rather than inherited tradition. In today’s Iraq, family lifeis no longer shaped primarily by custom —it is being slowly, and decisively,rewritten by the economy.

Written andedited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq’s conscription push tests balance between manpower and modernization

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:21:29 +0000

Shafaq News

Iraq’s parliament has reignited debate over compulsory military service after completing the first reading of a draft “national service” law, exposing divisions between supporters and opponents over its feasibility and impact.

Parliament Speaker Haibet al-Halbousi called for relevant authorities —including the defense, planning and finance ministries, along with the army’s general command— to review the proposal and submit observations. The draft outlines provisions to reinstate compulsory service, defining eligible age groups, service duration, recruitment, deferments, exemptions, and reserve obligations.

Supporters of the proposal told Shafaq News that the law could strengthen state institutions and national cohesion. Political analyst Zaid al-Shammari said the measure would enhance military readiness, promote discipline among youth, and contribute to social integration, adding that it could also help address unemployment if implemented effectively.

Opponents, however, warned of significant economic and structural challenges. Security experts Alaa al-Nashou and Adnan al-Kanani, along with lawmaker Saad al-Awadi, told Shafaq News that reinstating conscription would require extensive financial resources, administrative infrastructure, and expansion of military institutions. They cautioned that approving the law under current conditions could strain the budget, limit employment opportunities, and fail to align with modern warfare, which increasingly relies on technology rather than large troop numbers. Al-Awadi added that many lawmakers favor prioritizing technological capabilities, particularly given an estimated 1.6 million personnel already in state security structures.

Separately, dozens of lawmakers have called for the draft to be withdrawn or delayed until a new government is formed and defense sector needs are reassessed.

Compulsory military service was a central pillar of Iraq’s security system under Saddam Hussein, when it was mandatory for large segments of the population. The system was abolished after the 2003 US-led invasion and the dissolution of state military structures, leaving Iraq to rely on a volunteer-based force. Since then, successive Iraqi governments have repeatedly attempted to reintroduce national service laws, but proposals have faced political divisions, economic concerns, and shifting security priorities.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Ceasefire without sovereignty: how Lebanon's fragmented power blocks a peace with Israel

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:14:48 +0000

Shafaq News

Two days before a ten-day ceasefire came into effect,the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors sat across from each other in Washingtonon April 14, 2026 —the first direct meeting at that level in more than threedecades. The encounter did not produce a framework, a timeline, or a shareddefinition of what comes next. It only produced a dilemma that Beirut has beenunable to solve ever since: who speaks for Lebanon in a negotiation of thisconsequence, and through what institutional authority does any decision bindthe state?

The ceasefire text itself —the document Americandiplomacy spent considerable capital securing— offers the clearest availableevidence of Lebanon's actual negotiating position. The agreement commits theLebanese government, with international support, to preventing Hezbollah andother armed groups from launching attacks on Israel, and enshrines theprinciple that Lebanese security forces alone bear exclusive responsibility forthe country's sovereignty and defense.

Israel, in return, pledged to refrain from offensiveoperations inside Lebanese territory for the duration of the ceasefire, whileretaining what the text describes as the right to take measures it considersdefensive. It did not commit to withdraw from southern Lebanon, where Israeliforces maintain a buffer zone extending approximately ten kilometers insideLebanese territory. The fate of hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese,the question of Hezbollah's weapons, and the definition of the border —none ofthese appear in the agreement's operative provisions.

Lebanon was asked to assume obligations withoutreceiving equivalent commitments. The state was asked to act sovereign in itsresponsibilities while being treated as less than sovereign in itsentitlements. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was candid about the Israelireading: the ceasefire, in his framing, represents "an opportunity for ahistoric agreement with Lebanon," one that would translate Israel'smilitary superiority into lasting political and security arrangements, withHezbollah's dismantlement as the primary objective.

Beirut's official position, as articulated byPresident Joseph Aoun, set different priorities —full withdrawal of Israeliforces, deployment of the Lebanese army to internationally recognized borders,and the restoration of stability before any larger negotiation. Two partiessigned the same document with different visions of what it initiates.

The Legal Framework Of Prohibition

Lebanon's constitution has no constitutional articleprohibiting normalization with Israel, no explicit bar on diplomaticrecognition written into the foundational document of the state. Theprohibition is instead embedded in a layered legal framework that predates thecurrent constitutional order and carries its own enforcement teeth. Lebanon'santi-normalization mandates rest not on a single law but on three connectedsets of statutes: the criminal code, the 1955 Boycott Law, and the Code ofMilitary Justice, with penalties for contact ranging from imprisonment todeath.

The 1943 Criminal Code designates contact with enemystates as treason. The parliament passed the Lebanese Anti-Israeli Boycott Lawon June 23, 1955, constituting thirteen articles aimed at cutting all ties withIsrael, with Article 1 strictly prohibiting all persons from entering into anycontract with any organization or person holding Israeli nationality or locatedon Israeli territory.

Because each statute is couched in vague language,court decisions regarding violations are often arbitrary, and most any contactwith an Israeli can be construed as espionage or treason —a Lebanese activistwas convicted of high treason simply for giving an interview to an Israelijournalist. Any government seeking to move toward normalization would have tolegislatively dismantle this framework before taking a single diplomatic step.

A Hezbollah-aligned political source who spoke toShafaq News was unequivocal: direct negotiations with Israel are ruled out onprincipled grounds, and the maximum the party and its broader constituencycould accept is an arrangement resembling the 1949 armistice —indirect,requiring neither normalization nor mutual recognition.

The source reached back to the May 17, 1983,Agreement, signed under President Amine Gemayel with American sponsorship, asthe cautionary precedent: that accord deepened internal conflict, fractured thearmy, and prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000, nearly adecade after the civil war had formally ended, before collapsing under theweight of domestic rejection and regional opposition.

The 1983 agreement failed not because Hezbollahdestroyed it —the organization was in its earliest formation at the time — butbecause it lacked the cross-community legitimacy that Lebanon's politicalgeography has always required for consequential decisions to hold. Thatcondition has not changed.

MP Nazih Matta of the Lebanese Forces party, speakingof the opposite end of the Lebanese political spectrum, arrived at the sameupper limit independently: not full normalization, but a formula that stops thewar and preserves Lebanon's ability to renegotiate later. When the mostpro-engagement and most resistant voices in Lebanese politics converge on thesame ceiling, that ceiling is not a negotiating position. It is a structuralboundary — and it is the most honest political data point the current momenthas produced.

The Institutional Machinery That Makes ConsensusImpossible

The comparison that normalization advocates reach formost readily is Egypt and Jordan. Both states concluded formal peace agreementswith Israel —Egypt in 1979, Jordan in 1994. The argument runs that if Arabstates with comparable histories of conflict managed the transition, Lebanoncan too, given sufficient political will. The comparison obscures more than itreveals.

Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords, commandingconcentrated executive authority. King Hussein signed the Wadi Araba Treatywith equivalent sovereign decisiveness. In both cases, a single head of statepossessed the institutional capacity to commit the state, sustain thecommitment, and absorb the domestic political cost. Despite the popularsentiment, the governing variable decision was made and held.

According to Arab Barometer surveys published inJanuary 2025, after the Abraham Accords were reached, Jordanians and Egyptianswere among the least likely of twelve publics surveyed to favor normalizationwith Israel —only five percent in each country said they favored the process.Washington Institute polling conducted in 2022 found that opposition toallowing even business or sports ties with Israelis stands at 85 percent inEgypt and 87 percent in Jordan, figures that have remained broadly stable despitedecades of official relations between both governments and Tel Aviv.

The agreements were held not because populationsendorsed them but because the states that signed them had the institutionalmachinery to hold them independent of public approval.

Lebanon has no equivalent machinery. The 1989 TaifAgreement —the foundational post-civil war compact— institutionalized thefragmentation of executive authority into the constitutional order itself. TheTaif framework gave Maronites, Sunnis, and Shia practically equal power andinfluence over the state's domestic decisions and those concerning foreignpolicy, with each community holding effective veto authority over the others.

Each confessional group of ministers can hold thegovernment hostage by exercising their right to veto in the name of thesectarian group they claim to represent, overriding the interests of theelectorate that brought them to power. A foreign policy decision asconsequential as normalization would require cross-community consensus thatTaif's machinery makes structurally improbable and that Lebanon's currentpolitical alignment makes functionally impossible.

The resistance to the current track is not confined toHezbollah's constituency. MP Hassan Mrad, following his meeting with SunniMufti of the Republic Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian, conveyed a position thatcrossed sectarian lines: any negotiation, regardless of its form or pathway,acquires legitimacy only through national consensus and commitment to thebroader Arab political framework.

That the Sunni religious establishment is issuing thiscaution alongside the Shia political axis reflects the Taif logic in practice:The veto is a constitutional feature available to every significant community.

External Penetration Compounds Internal Fragmentation

Lebanese sovereignty is not only fragmented acrosssectarian institutions —it is penetrated from outside by actors whose interestsin the outcome compete with each other and, in fundamental ways, with Lebanon'sown. Washington applies pressure for a settlement. Tehran applies pressureagainst one. Hezbollah operates within both registers simultaneously —as aLebanese political actor and as a regional instrument of Iranian influence. TheLebanese state, sitting at the intersection of these forces, cannot navigatebetween them because it does not possess the institutional authority to do so.

Lebanese political analyst Khalil Nasrallah toldShafaq News that what is currently unfolding amounts to "an attempt toexploit an opportunity to impose some form of peace agreement between Lebanonand Israel, but this path is fraught with obstacles." His emphasis on theword impose captures the structural problem precisely, which is theSOVEREIGNITY.

Diplomatic pressure is being applied as if Lebanonwere a sovereign state capable of receiving and implementing a foreign policydirective. The institutional reality is considerably more complex.

The Case For The Ceasefire Path, And Its HonestCeiling

George al-Aakoury, a Lebanese political analyst, readsthe current moment as an enforced necessity rather than a chosen direction.Speaking to Shafaq News, he argued that the agreement carries two simultaneousdimensions: “an immediate one, ending the destructive conduct on the ground,and a wider one connected to a regional vision of peace.”

His more significant point was about how Lebanonarrived here: “Hezbollah, by binding Lebanon's fate to Iran's regional project,left the state with no other instrument to stop the war.” In that reading,President Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam did not pursue this path forpolitical advantage or out of any orientation toward normalization; they aremanaging the consequences of a war the state did not fully choose and cannotfully control.

MP Matta told Shafaq News that Lebanon is notnecessarily heading toward full normalization. The significance of the currentmoment, in his framing, lies in the fact that the state is now negotiating inits own name, “not through Syria, not through Hezbollah, not throughintermediaries speaking on its behalf.”

The realistic maximum, he suggested, may not be afinal agreement but a return to something resembling the 1949 armistice: aformula that stops the war and allows Lebanon to attempt, in more favorablefuture conditions, to improve its terms. He acknowledged, without evasion, thatIsrael is negotiating from a position of military victory, and that Lebanoncannot recover better negotiating terms without first recovering control overits weapons from Hezbollah.

That last observation closes the circle. Thesovereignty deficit that prevents Lebanon from saying yes to normalization isthe same deficit that prevents it from saying no with any binding force.Hezbollah's weapons give Israel its primary justification for maintaining abuffer zone in southern Lebanon, while simultaneously ensuring that Lebanoncannot negotiate as an equal —the state is asked to assume the obligations ofsovereignty in a document, while the conditions for exercising it remaincontested on the ground.

Israel has its own strategic imperatives for thepositions it holds, and those imperatives do not dissolve with any Lebanesepolitical decision alone. Among significant currents in Israeli religious andpolitical life, Lebanon has historically featured in territorial visions thatextend well beyond security rationale, a dimension that shapes how Lebaneseacross the political spectrum read Israeli military presence, regardless ofwhat any ceasefire text says.

The gap between what the agreement demands of Lebanonand what Lebanon is structurally capable of delivering is not a gap thatdiplomatic pressure from Washington can close by itself.

What The Public Data Reflects And What It Conceals

The Arab Opinion Index 2025 recorded 89 percent ofLebanese respondents rejecting recognition of Israel. A separate Gallup surveyfound 79 percent supporting the Lebanese army as the country's sole armed force—a figure widely read not as openness to normalization but as rejection ofHezbollah's parallel military authority. The two statistics point in differentdirections and do not resolve into a coherent policy mandate. They reflect apopulation navigating contradictory pressures with no institutional mechanismcapable of translating its preferences into state action.

Ahmad, a university student interviewed by ShafaqNews, framed the opposition position with clarity: "Normalization is notpeace —it is surrender." Rawan offered the economic rationalistcounterargument: Lebanon is collapsing, its currency worthless, its youthemigrating, and if any arrangement could bring investment or lift isolation,the question deserves rational examination rather than dismissal.

Imad, a Beirut resident, cut through both positionswith the observation that functions as the analytical key to the entire debate:the problem is "the absence of a real state capable of making such adecision or any other strategic decision," with authority"distributed among parties, militias, religious authorities, and regionalstates, while the state stands as a mere facade." Imad is describing aconstitutional and institutional condition that neither the optimists nor theopponents of normalization have honestly reckoned with.

The Lebanese state cannot produce a binding foreignpolicy decision on normalization because its institutional design does notpermit one actor to commit all the others,and no external diplomatic pressure, however sustained, changes thatunderlying condition.

The ambassador meeting in Washington was a proceduralbreakthrough, and the ceasefire text was a diplomatic document. Convertingeither into a sovereign decision requires institutional machinery that Lebanondoes not currently possess. The real negotiation —the one that addresses thegap between the obligations being placed on the Lebanese state and its actualcapacity to fulfill them— has yet to begin.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq’s Najaf: Libraries resurrecting history from the ashes

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:15:10 +0000

Shafaq News

In the narrow alleys of Najaf, behind woodenMashrabiyya (ornamental lattice) screens and heavy doors, four librariessafeguard one of the Islamic world’s most significant concentrations ofmanuscript heritage. Some of their holdings are more than a thousand years old.

The collections span an extraordinary range—stone-inscribed texts, undotted Quranic manuscripts, and Quranic versesrecorded on materials as unusual as snakeskin and grains of rice. The cityitself, located roughly 160 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, has drawnscholars, rulers, and pilgrims for centuries because of the shrine of Imam Aliibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the firstimam of Shia Islam. Where pilgrims travel, knowledge accumulates.

The Al-Alawi Repository

The first stop was the al-Alawi Repository, one of theoldest manuscript collections in Iraq. Ali Lafta al-Issawi, head of itsresearch and studies unit, told Shafaq News that the repository ranks second inage among Iraqi collections, after the Iraqi National Museum, with its originstracing back to the fourth Hijri century under Adud al-Dawla al-Buwayhi, whodied in 372 AH.

The collection is divided into two categories. Thefirst includes Quranic manuscripts of exceptional historical significance,donated by kings and sultans who visited the shrine of Imam Ali. Among them arecopies attributed to master calligraphers Yaqut al-Mustasimi, al-Suhrawardi,and al-Sayrafi, along with ancient vellum manuscripts more than a thousandyears old, including two copies attributed to Imam Ali and his son Imamal-Hasan.

The second category contains millennium-oldmanuscripts written over a thousand years ago. The repository preservesapproximately 15 handwritten works from this period, including texts attributedto Sheikh al-Tusi, who died in 460 AH, and to Allama al-Hilli. The oldest itemis a Quran attributed to Imam Ali, written in undotted Kufic script —theearliest known form of Arabic calligraphy.

Al-Issawi explained that total holdings reach roughly8,000 manuscripts, spanning jurisprudence, Islamic legal theory, medicine,astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and other fields. After 2003, the AlawiShrine established a dedicated center for manuscript photography andrestoration using modern equipment, expanded the collection by 4,000manuscripts, and issued seven volumes of catalogues documenting the archive.

The Haidari Library

The Haidari Library opened in 2005 under directivesfrom Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shia religious authority inIraq. At its founding, it contained around 8,000 books. Today, according tolibrary official Ali Kadhim Hamad, that figure exceeds 350,000 volumes.

Hamad noted that the library has received nearly 130personal collections donated as religious endowments, alongside 8,000university theses. It holds close to 450,000 titles related to the biographyand legacy of Imam Ali, as well as more than 400 scientific and religiousjournal titles, open to readers of all faiths and denominations. Monthlyvisitors average about 2,000. The oldest printed item in the collection is aperiodical titled Al-Jinan, dating to 1880.

The Al-Hasan Library

The third stop was the Al-Hasan Library, where SheikhMahdi Baqer al-Quraishi serves as director. He explained that the library beganwith only dozens of books before expanding into one of Najaf’s largestcollections, now surpassing 100,000 volumes. Its readers include students fromthe Hawza —the Shia Islamic seminary system centered in Najaf— as well aspostgraduate students from universities across Iraq. Religious classes are alsoheld within its reading rooms.

The library, Al-Quraishi noted, preserves raremanuscripts dating back more than 700 years, including a copy of Nahjal-Balagha —a canonical collection of sermons and letters attributed to ImamAli— brought from India, as well as at least one manuscript older than athousand years. One of the library’s founders, Sheikh Baqer al-Quraishi,authored nearly 100 scholarly works.

The Kashif al-Ghata Library

The final stop was the Kashif al-Ghata Library, whereSheikh Ahmed Kashif al-Ghata described conditions unlike those faced by theother three collections. Before 2003, and especially after 1991, libraries inNajaf operated under severe pressure. Some manuscripts were burned for fuel.Others were struck by gunfire, with visible damage still marking their pages.

Sheikh Ahmed noted that the Sheikh al-Tusi Library—closely linked to this network— managed to photograph roughly 55,000manuscript copies, a figure that reflects the scale of Iraq’s still largelyuncatalogued manuscript heritage. He added that around eight million images andhistorical documents have been photographed and catalogued, with the firstvolume published and additional volumes in preparation.

The Kashif al-Ghata Library itself houses more than40,000 books, including 1,000 rare copies. Among its most notable holdings arethe earliest known edition of Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the most authoritativehadith collections in Sunni Islam; the first edition of the Bible printed inBerlin; and an Arabic translation of the Bible dating to 1600 CE.

A City That Accumulates Knowledge

Najaf is Iraq’s fifth most populous city with morethan 1.19 million people, but its significance extends far beyond population.The presence of the shrine of Imam Ali has made it a global center of Shiareligious scholarship for more than a millennium. The Hawza continues to drawstudents from across the Muslim world.

The libraries visited by Shafaq News are inseparablefrom that history: they exist because kings donated manuscripts when they cameto pray, because scholars settled nearby to remain close to the shrine, andbecause knowledge —like the city itself— has proven difficult to erase.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.

Opinion: Washington pursues regional de-escalation through fragile frameworks

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:19:59 +0000

Shafaq News- Washington

A tentative push to ease tensions in the Middle East is taking shape —from Lebanon-Israel talks to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz— two political experts briefed Shafaq News on Saturday, while cautioning that the underlying drivers behind these tensions remain firmly in place, limiting prospects for a lasting breakthrough.

According to Professor Paolo von Schirach, head of the Global Policy Institute at Bay Atlantic University, the unprecedented direct contact between Lebanon and Israel marks an “extraordinary diplomatic breakthrough,” situating it within a broader US effort to wind down the Lebanese front amid mounting domestic economic pressure.

He stressed that the core challenge for Washington remains Iran rather than Lebanon, tracing the origins of the crisis to Tehran’s long-standing effort to “turn southern Lebanon into a sphere of influence through Hezbollah,” which he described as “a military entity parallel to state sovereignty.”

While ongoing negotiations indicate a willingness to explore mechanisms to limit the group’s role in the south, von Schirach is skeptical over the likelihood of Hezbollah voluntarily disarming.

“As long as Iranian supply lines remain active, even at a minimal level, the group dissolving itself is not an option,” he noted, adding that despite heavy Israeli strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure and the killing of key figures, including former Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, the organization continues to function.

From Washington’s standpoint, Iran’s nuclear program continues to dominate strategic calculations. “I do not believe concessions in Lebanon will lead to nuclear concessions from Tehran,” he observed. “The nuclear program represents Iran’s most important strategic asset. Giving it up would mean losing all leverage. A voluntary abandonment remains far-fetched.”

He also noted domestic pressures shaping US policy, particularly rising gasoline prices tied to regional instability. “The American voter focuses on purchasing power,” he added, while indicating that President Donald Trump faces pressure to contain the conflict while delivering a tangible outcome that justifies the costs involved —something that has yet to fully materialize in the Iran file.

Meanwhile, Thomas Warrick, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, underlined the growing importance of maritime dynamics, particularly Iran’s move to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping following the recently implemented US-Iran temporary ceasefire.

Describing the step as a possible signal of a “genuine” effort to reduce tensions, he cautioned it could also function as a calculated measure aimed at introducing transit fees later.

The uncertainty, he assessed, reflects a broader strategy as the United States maintains a naval presence in the Gulf of Oman under what he characterized as a policy of “caution and pressure,” designed to prevent any shift toward financial or strategic leverage.

Pointing to “real hope” that the Strait will remain open, he underlined that emerging diplomatic momentum, particularly over the past 24 hours, has generated measurable progress, though “fundamental and complex issues” remain unresolved.

Earlier this week, Trump maintained that Iran has agreed to suspend its nuclear program “indefinitely,” describing a potential deal as “nearly complete.” He also indicated that Tehran is seeking direct engagement, while Washington has yet to finalize the official who will lead the US delegation for any signing ceremony.

Axios reported that US and Iranian officials could meet as soon as this weekend to finalize a three-page framework aimed at ending the current standoff. According to US officials familiar with the process, several core issues remain unresolved. One proposal under consideration involves releasing up to $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Tehran relinquishing its enriched uranium stockpile and accepting a halt to enrichment activities.

Trump, however, maintained that Iran would not regain access to frozen assets under the current terms under discussion. He further insisted that the United States would not lift its naval blockade before a final deal is reached, while underscoring the strategic importance of keeping the Strait of Hormuz open to global shipping.

Iran has not confirmed any commitment to suspend its nuclear program. Meanwhile, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that transit through the Strait would operate only along “designated routes and with Iran’s permission,” adding that the waterway would not remain open if the blockade continues.

For Shafaq News, Mostafa Hashem, Washington, D.C.