The Daily Digest
Iraqi intelligence seized drones, munitions and weapons in Maysan on 22 August, raids reported in the south as the arms crackdown persists and separately as an intelligence seizure of drones and weapons. They fall inside a clock the parliament speaker set the same day, fixing end-September for the state to collect arms held outside its hands. The president told reporters the Peshmerga are not part of the weapons process — a carve-out extended to Erbil's forces and to no Baghdad-based faction, whose channels relayed his handover demand a day earlier without any of them answering it.
The PMF authority said on Sunday morning that its 63rd Brigade repelled an ISIS assault on a commando-battalion position in the Marsa Ali sector of Tuz Khurmatu, east of Salah al-Din. No group claimed the attack and every version of it traces back to the PMF's own words, as today's militia digest sets out — an account the factions sourced entirely themselves, made in the weeks the state has given them to disarm.
On the domestic front, the office of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki denied reports that he had agreed to relinquish the Interior Ministry, a portfolio in play as post-election government formation proceeds. Shibl al-Zaydi joined the Shiite Coordination Framework's leadership in the same days, placing the bloc bargaining over the security ministries under expanded leadership.
Baghdad reaffirmed on Sunday morning its readiness for what it called the "historic" withdrawal of the US-led coalition, and parliament is to take up a strategic pact with France. A US federal judge struck down the immigrant visa ban covering 75 countries, Iraq among them; the restriction on Iraqis fell in a US court, not at Baghdad's request.
On the economy, Iran granted permission for some Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, covering only part of the fleet at Baghdad's request. An education official said nearly 20,000 employees of the electricity ministry are illiterate, Rudaw reported, a state payroll figure standing against the same year in which a trading firm put Erbil's gold and silver trade at 172 tons worth $885 million.