These goalposts have legs, and they run.
On September 22, Iraq’s prime minister Ali al-Zaidi pushed the deadline for disarming the militias from September 30 to June 2027. The two big holdouts, Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, both backed by the Islamic Regime that occupies Iran, had said they’d keep their guns until foreign troops left. On September 30 the US-led coalition withdrew from Iraq. So they handed everything in, right?
Of course not. A day before the exit a Nujaba front group said it won’t disarm without permission from a religious authority, and Kataib Hezbollah says it has proof the Americans are still flying around up there. I grew up on Sierra adventure games, and I’ve seen fairer puzzles. You find the key, the door moves. At least the game had the decency to kill you and play a little tune.
Lebanon, 2000. As the Christian Science Monitor told it, Israel withdrew, a UN team confirmed the border, and Hezbollah seized on the Shebaa Farms, a 12-square-mile patch, as its reason to keep fighting anyway. I know how that sequel ends, and I don’t want to watch it again in Baghdad.
Nujaba’s spokesman, Hussein Ali al-Mousawi, put it plainly:
We will not give up our weapons. The move to monopolize weapons is directed solely against the weapons of the resistance [yes, that’s what disarming a militia means] and is driven by American-Israeli dictates.
The pressure does land on the factions that refused, and it does come with an American signature: the State Department says Marco Rubio and al-Zaidi agreed on “the importance of Iraq dismantling terrorist militias.” A disarmament schedule that turns up in a Washington readout looks, from inside a militia, like a foreign order, and a man who calls himself the resistance doesn’t take those.
That’s fair as far as it goes, and still it goes nowhere, because a country can’t keep two armies, and the way I read it the second one answers to the occupying force. Al-Zaidi said disarmament “is not something that is optional. It is a necessity,” and called it a matter of honour, which takes nerve in Baghdad. Then he gave the holdouts nine more months. Who blinked? We all know.
FAIL, for militias that found a new excuse the week the old one went home, and for the nine months they were handed. My money says the next excuse shows up around May 2027. I’d bet the house, if anybody were dumb enough to take the other side.