Baghdad's stalled Hashd al-Shaabi bill tests Iraq's legislative arithmetic

On 13 June 2026, with Iraq's Council of Representatives deep into a parliamentary session that has produced few headline votes, a senior media official of the Popular Mobilisation Forces — known in Arabic as the Hashd al-Shaabi — chose an unusual venue for a procedural argument. Mohand al-Aqabi, the organisation's media director, publicly appealed to lawmakers: pass the long-stalled legal framework governing the paramilitary coalition, or, if the numbers are not there, hold a symbolic first reading — the "legislative fatiha" in Iraqi political parlance — so the public can at least see where every MP stands.

The framing matters. A first reading is the lowest procedural bar in Iraq's legislative pipeline; it commits a chamber to nothing beyond debate. But a public call for one, by a Hashd media chief, on the record, is a measure of how confident the paramilitaries have become — and how thin the legislative arithmetic now looks in Baghdad.

What the bill actually does, and why it has stalled

The Hashd al-Shaabi, formalised as the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in 2016, was created in the heat of the war against the Islamic State. The legal framework that governs it has been debated, in various drafts, since at least 2016, and has spent the better part of a decade shuttling between the prime minister's office, parliamentary blocs, and the armed groups themselves. The core disputes are familiar: whether the PMF answers to the prime minister as commander-in-chief, whether its brigades are folded into the regular security services or retain separate chains of command, and which budget lines fund its salaries and equipment.

The bill's opponents, both inside the Sunni Arab and Kurdish parliamentary blocs and among parts of the Sadrist movement that has fractured since Muqtada al-Sadr's 2022 withdrawal from politics, treat the law as a ratification of state capture. Its supporters, including several Iran-aligned factions and parts of the Shia political mainstream, frame it as the final normalisation of forces that bled for Iraq between 2014 and 2017.

In short: the same text that legalises the PMF also embeds it. That is why every prime minister since 2016 has treated it as politically radioactive.

The "legislative fatiha" as a pressure tactic

The phrase al-Aqabi invoked — "legislative fatiha," from the Arabic opening prayer recited at the start of Quranic chapters — is an Iraqi shorthand for a first reading, the chamber's lowest-commitment procedural step. Demanding one, in public, from a paramilitary media platform, is a tactical move: it shifts the burden. Lawmakers are forced either to take a vote they would rather defer, or to record a non-vote that the Hashd and its political allies can then campaign against.

For an organisation that until 2016 operated as an extralegal coalition of militias, the symbolic inversion is striking. The Hashd is no longer asking for recognition; it is asking for codification, and it is threatening to publicise any MP who refuses even a symbolic reading.

What it tells us about Baghdad's coalition maths

The parliamentary math is the point. Iraq's Council of Representatives has been operating with an unstable majority since the 2021 elections, with the Sadrists' boycott, the resignation of Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi in late 2023, and repeated attempts to form a "national majority" government under Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani. The Sudanese government's coalition depends on coordination between the Coordination Framework — a loose Shia alliance that includes the Fateh Alliance, the State of Law coalition, and several Iran-aligned factions — and the Sunni and Kurdish blocs. None of these groups has uniform enthusiasm for a Hashd legal charter that, depending on the draft, would entrench a parallel military structure.

A public appeal for a legislative fatiha, then, is a way of flushing out the coalition: which blocs will vote present, which will boycott, and which will use the opportunity to renegotiate amendments in exchange for a quorum. It is also, in the longer arc, a way of normalising the Hashd as a permanent constitutional fixture — a status the paramilitaries have effectively enjoyed in practice since 2017 but have never quite managed in law.

The structural frame, in plain language

The dispute is older than the bill. Iraq's post-2003 security architecture has run on a quiet bargain: armed groups that fought the Islamic State would be paid by Baghdad, equipped through informal channels, and tolerated as long as they did not openly challenge the prime minister. The bargain held under existential threat. It is fraying now, both because the ISIS war is over and because the Shia political field has fragmented into at least three rival power centres — the Sadrists, the Coordination Framework, and the Iran-aligned factions that operate closer to Tehran than to Najaf.

A legal charter would lock that bargain into statute. A continued stall preserves the ambiguity that lets every faction interpret the rules to its advantage. Al-Aqabi's public appeal is, in this sense, an attempt to force the ambiguity out into the open — and to do so on a parliamentary record.

Stakes, and what remains uncertain

If the Sudanese government succeeds in passing the law, the Hashd's brigades will gain a legal footing that the United States, in particular, has spent the better part of a decade trying to prevent. Several of those brigades are still sanctioned or designated as terrorist organisations by Washington; codification in Iraqi law does not affect those designations, but it complicates the political case for keeping them on the list. If the bill fails, the Hashd and its political allies will have a clean campaign issue to deploy against Sunni and Kurdish MPs in the next electoral cycle, and the legislative stalemate that has defined Iraq's security debate since 2016 will roll forward into another parliament.

What the public comments do not specify, and what the available reporting does not resolve, is whether al-Aqabi's appeal reflects a coordinated Hashd-wide position or a factional press. The paramilitary coalition has been visibly split since at least 2022 between the Iran-aligned groups under the banner of Kata'ib Hezbollah and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, and the more nationalist factions closer to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. A unified public appeal for a legislative fatiha, on a single day, would suggest a temporary alignment; a splintered response would suggest that the public-facing pressure is itself a factional manoeuvre.

Either way, the political calendar is tightening. Iraq's next routine budget cycle, the next round of US-Iraq security dialogue, and the unresolved status of the Iraqi Sunni provinces will all sit on top of this argument. The first reading al-Aqabi is demanding is, in procedural terms, a small thing. In political terms, it is the moment Iraq's parliament is asked to say, on the record, whether the post-ISIS security order is to be written into law — or left, as it has been, to the discretion of whoever holds the prime minister's office on any given afternoon.

This article is filed under the MENA desk. Where wire coverage of Iraq's paramilitary politics tends to treat the Hashd as a unitary actor, Monexus has attempted to flag the internal factional split that the available sources do not resolve.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/JahanTasnim