Seeking to maintain their representatives' influence in government, factions of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have set conditions for selecting the next prime minister. Meanwhile, President Barham Salih told parliamentary blocs Jan. 29 to name a prime minister. He gave them until Feb. 1 to do so, saying that otherwise he would select a candidate himself.

The PMU is an Iraqi paramilitary coalition, but many of its factions support Iran. Qais al-Khazali, secretary-general of one of those powerful Iran-backed factions, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, specified in a Jan. 27 tweet the conditions for choosing the next prime minister. He noted that any candidate must be independent, must be exclusively of Iraqi nationality, must pledge to fulfill parliament’s decision of ousting foreign troops and must implement the "oil for reconstruction" agreement with China.

Kataib Hezbollah, another of the Iran-backed factions, had already listed its conditions for the next prime minister in a Dec. 17 statement calling for a candidate who can face “the Zionist-American-Saudi project in Iraq.”

“These conditions are being used by the PMU factions to ensure a balance of powers, which brought [Adel] Abdul Mahdi to the premiership," writer and political analyst Ihsan al-Shammari, director of the Baghdad-based Iraqi Center for Political Thought, told Al-Monitor. "His departure would shake this balance."