In a phone call on 5 November, US President Donald Trump warned Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi that Washington would strike Iraq’s armed factions and their leaders if they joined a renewed war on Iran’s side. According to sources familiar with the call, he also said any further delay in bringing weapons under state control would lead Washington to reassess its support for Zaidi’s government. The following day Zaidi made an unannounced visit of several hours to Tehran to meet Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliament speaker who leads Iran’s negotiating team with the United States.

In the days since, Baghdad has cancelled government contracts held by companies it links to Kataib Hezbollah, the most powerful of the Iran-aligned factions, and the faction has replied with public accusations about the wealth of the prime minister’s family. On 8 November a drone attack halted production at the Khor Mor gas field in the Kurdistan Region’s Chamchamal district and cut about 2.8 gigawatts of generation. Security sources traced its launch to an area east of Tuz Khurmatu, and the attack came a day after a Kataib Hezbollah statement had referred to the facility.

These events place the future of the three factions that have yet to accept integration, Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, within the wider confrontation between Washington and Tehran. Baghdad’s negotiations with them are highly unlikely to resolve the question of their weapons, because those weapons form part of Iran’s position in that confrontation and Tehran has little reason to give them up while it continues. The talks still serve Baghdad in two limited ways: they show Washington enough progress to keep US sanctions at bay, and for now they restrain how far the factions use their arsenals. The demands each faction has tabled, examined in turn, show how much of what they seek lies beyond the reach of the Iraqi state.

Context: The government’s timetable now runs to 30 June 2027. The original deadline of 30 September, which coincided with the end of the US-led coalition’s mission, became the starting point of a phased process that opens with a 90-day de-escalation period. Zaidi says five factions have completed the handover of their weapons and joined the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), the state-funded umbrella of mostly Shia armed groups. A government source has named them as Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Kataib al-Imam Ali, Saraya al-Salam, Ansar Allah al-Awfiya and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, although Sayyid al-Shuhada and Awfiya both deny surrendering their arsenals.

The factions call the process “regulation”. An analyst close to the ruling Shia Coordination Framework describes an agreement signed in October under which faction weapons are held in dedicated depots and inspected by a joint committee, with the government deciding on their use while the factions retain possession.

The same government source says Tehran regards the factions’ weapons as a negotiating card in its relations with Washington and does not want the factions to negotiate their future with Baghdad on their own. Abu Alaa al-Walai, the leader of Sayyid al-Shuhada, and Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, have each reportedly told Zaidi that their willingness to give up their weapons depends on whether fighting between the United States and Iran resumes. According to the same reporting, factions are prepared to move weapons meant to deter outside attack to Iran or to other factions, and to keep those that serve as political guarantees at home.

Iranian media said the talks during Zaidi’s visit focused exclusively on Iraq’s efforts to end the war. Tehran’s negotiators are demanding that Washington lift sanctions, end its naval blockade and release frozen assets. Trump rejected an Iranian proposal to end the war on 26 September and sent a further aircraft carrier to the region, due in late November. While that confrontation remains open, the Iraqi factions are among the few levers Iran holds close to US partners in the Gulf, and nothing Baghdad can offer the factions would compensate Tehran for giving them up.

Within those limits, the talks do useful work for Baghdad. Washington has shown its readiness to use Iraq’s dependence on the dollar: it halted a cash shipment of about $500 million in April and has barred around 20 Iraqi banks from dollar transactions. The US Treasury has now asked Iraq to close all but two of its border crossings with Iran. Visible progress on the factions’ weapons gives Zaidi a case against further penalties.

The talks have also coincided with a degree of restraint, with Kataib Hezbollah saying it has halted military operations inside Iraq and Awfiya pledging neutrality unless Iraqi territory is used to attack a neighbour. That restraint has limits. Small new groups carried out attacks on Saudi Arabia in September, according to Iraqi reporting, and the depot model leaves the weapons in the hands of the factions that hold them.

Analysis: The three factions resist integration for different reasons, and those reasons decide how far Baghdad can deal with each of them.

Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, led by Abu Alaa al-Walai and listed by the United States as a foreign terrorist organisation since 2025, wants guarantees that lie mostly outside Iraq. Its ten conditions, published on 29 August, begin with a complete US withdrawal by land, sea and air and a ban on using Iraqi airspace to strike any other country, which in practice means Iran. They go on to the withdrawal of Turkish forces and the PKK, federal army control of the Kurdistan Region’s borders and crossings, and the expulsion of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups. The first condition was met when US forces completed their departure on 30 September, and the faction kept its weapons regardless.

The remaining conditions depend on others. The Kurdistan Region’s control of its own borders dates from the international intervention of 1991, when the safe haven and no-fly zone ended Baghdad’s authority in the north, and it was later written into the 2005 constitution. The Iranian Kurdish parties, based in the region since the 1980s, are a file Tehran pursues directly with Baghdad: Iran’s ambassador said on 20 October that Iraq had agreed to expel them or hand them over to Tehran, and Iranian pressure has included moving them to a third country. What the faction does not want is to give up its weapons while any of these conditions stands, which gives it a lasting justification for keeping them.

Sayyid al-Shuhada is nonetheless the easiest of the three to manage. It is centralised under a single leader, it has a parliamentary bloc, Muntasirun, inside Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition, and it holds the Tourism Ministry, so Baghdad has a clear address and clear points of pressure. On 7 November it denied accepting controls on its weapons, while confirming it had signed a separate sovereignty agreement with three other factions, the Coordination Framework and Zaidi.

Kataib Hezbollah is the hardest case, and its standing predates the current talks. The faction has long regarded itself, and been regarded by other factions, as the elite of Iraq’s armed groups: directly linked to the IRGC, better trained and equipped, and in effect untouchable. When the PMF leadership tried to dismiss its security chief, Abu Zainab al-Lami, a Kataib Hezbollah figure, the faction sent armed vehicles to the PMF headquarters and the decision was reversed. Its structure is decentralised and opaque and it answers to no single Iraqi leader. A senior commander, Abu Fadak al-Mohammedawi, serves as the PMF’s chief of staff and de facto field commander, so folding its fighters into the PMF would place them under a command the faction already holds.

What Kataib Hezbollah wants is to keep the territory and revenue it has built. According to a government source, it asked for about $3 billion in cash, no role for the security agencies in Jurf al-Sakhar, no reopening of the file on land it seized in Baghdad’s Dora district and the chairmanship of the Border Crossings Authority, in return for handing over all its weapons. Zaidi refused. Jurf al-Sakhar, about 60 kilometres south of Baghdad, has been closed to government and army officials since its recapture from ISIS in 2014, and an estimated 180,000 displaced residents have not been allowed to return. Zaidi ordered an investigation into fuel smuggling there on 11 November, and figures circulating in Baghdad put the armed groups’ earnings from it at more than 2 trillion dinars over five years. The crossings matter for a related reason: they are among the channels through which, by one analyst’s estimate, $8 billion to $12 billion a year moves to Iran, and Washington now wants most of them closed.

What Kataib Hezbollah refuses is any arrangement that ends its military role in Iran’s camp. It said on 7 November that it would not abandon Iran or surrender its weapons under pressure, and Zaidi’s cancellation of contracts the government links to the faction has raised its costs without reaching its arsenal.

Harakat al-Nujaba, led by Akram al-Kaabi, is more ideological still. It asks nothing of the state: it takes no part in elections or government, and the government source describes it as the only faction refusing even to negotiate over its weapons, which it ties to its doctrine and to the US war on Iran. It is, however, much smaller, holds no territory and is more exposed. Iraqi security forces arrested one of its commanders in mid-August over drone attacks, and if Baghdad ever chose force, Nujaba would be far easier to dismantle than Kataib Hezbollah.

The Shia parties of the Coordination Framework have reasons to keep the talks going and reasons to keep the factions. The United States holds what amounts to a nuclear option over Iraq. Oil sales fund about 90 percent of the state budget, and the revenues are held in Iraq’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A cut in that flow would hit the salaries and transfers through which oil income is shared among Shia, Sunni and Kurdish constituencies, the core of Iraq’s post-2003 bargain, and could threaten the Shia-led order itself. The Framework therefore needs to be seen to comply with US demands.

The factions are also useful to the same parties, and to Tehran, as a deterrent. If Washington or Israel were to use the Iranian Kurdish groups against Iran, the factions would be expected to strike the Kurdistan Region, and they have shown they can reach it: local authorities have blamed Iran-backed Iraqi groups for repeated attacks on the Khor Mor gas field. That double interest explains the Framework’s conduct. It endorsed the June 2027 deadline on 19 October, yet its leaders warn that arresting faction members could bring down the government and the Shia alliance, and its own committee had drawn up a signed paper setting out the factions’ conditions, which Zaidi set aside after 30 September.

Kataib Hezbollah and Nujaba, the two groups most capable of drawing Iraq into a wider war, have signed none of the agreements reached so far. Their future, and Sayyid al-Shuhada’s after them, is tied to the course of the US-Iran war. A limited agreement between Washington and Tehran could produce a long suspension of the factions’ operations with their arsenals kept in reserve. Only a broader settlement that changed Iran’s own calculations would make integration by June 2027 achievable, and even then Kataib Hezbollah’s hold on Jurf al-Sakhar would remain to be dealt with inside Iraq.

The clearest measures of progress will be whether the government can enter and administer that district, whether the commander-in-chief can stop a faction from using its weapons, and whether he can change the leadership of a PMF formation without its parent faction’s consent.