Katayib Sayyid al-Shuhada Rejects Disarmament, Calls It "Reorganization" With Conditions

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - Katayib Sayyid al-Shuhada, affiliated with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq under Abu Ala al-Walai, issued a statement on Saturday reframing the entire weapons handover process as a reorganization of arms under government control rather than a surrender or disarmament, while laying out conditions for participation in that process, with the complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and the expulsion of PKK fighters as its most prominent demands.

The statement represents a significant semantic and political move. By describing the process as reorganization rather than disarmament or handover, the faction is explicitly rejecting the framing that Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's government and Washington have used for the September 30, 2026, deadline, preserving its claim that it retains the right to bear arms as a matter of resistance necessity. "Carrying arms by the resistance is a necessity, and whenever circumstances require it, arms will be picked up again, and no force can prevent it," the statement said.

The faction's first and most prominent condition is the complete withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, specifying that the US must not maintain any military presence under any title and that Iraqi airspace must not be used to attack any country, particularly neighboring states. The second condition is the formal approval by Iraq's Council of Representatives of a law governing the Popular Mobilization Forces in a manner that protects the right of the PMF to bear arms, an explicit demand for a legislative guarantee of its armed status before it participates in any reorganization process. The third condition is the strengthening of Iraq's air defense systems to assert full sovereignty over Iraqi airspace and territory, operated exclusively under Iraqi decision-making authority to counter any attack regardless of its source.

The fourth condition is the complete and permanent expulsion of PKK fighters from Iraqi territory into Turkish borders, to end what the faction describes as the justification for Turkish military attacks on Iraqi soil. The fifth condition is the liberation of Iraq's financial and economic decision-making from American dominance so that Iraq becomes master of itself, a principle the statement says has long been called for by the supreme religious authority and the Iraqi people's elite. The sixth and final condition demands an end to what the statement calls the innovation of the US special envoy for Iraq, saying the envoy must be abolished, and that the American embassy in Baghdad must stop interfering in Iraq's internal affairs.

The framing of the process as reorganization rather than disarmament is the statement's most consequential political move. It allows the faction to participate nominally in a government-led process without accepting the premise that it is permanently surrendering its weapons or its identity as an armed resistance group. By insisting that arms will be picked up again whenever circumstances require, the statement preserves the faction's operational autonomy even within a framework of nominal government control, directly challenging the objective that Washington has defined for the September 30 deadline, which is not reorganization but the permanent placement of all militia weapons under exclusive state authority.

Two Iraqi government sources told Kurdistan 24 exclusively on August 18, 2026, that the disarmament process has reached a complete deadlock, with Katayib Sayyid al-Shuhada among the factions that have flatly refused to hand over weapons. The Nasr Alliance warned that failure to disarm by September 30 could push Iraq into civil war. Friday's statement suggests that even the version of compliance the faction is willing to offer falls well short of what Baghdad and Washington have demanded.