Iraq says Washington cleared 40 Iranian flights a day at Najaf, with Mahan Air left out

Iraq said on Friday that the United States has cleared Iranian airlines, other than Mahan Air, to operate up to 40 flights a day to and from Najaf International Airport. The announcement came from the office of Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi. It widens a waiver that, four days earlier, covered only Iraqi Airways.

On 29 September, government spokesman Haider al-Aboudi said Iraqi Airways could carry passengers between Najaf and Iran while Iranian carriers remained barred from Iraqi airports. That earlier deal followed a US Treasury move on 8 September that sanctioned dozens of Iranian airlines. A temporary licence let Iraqi Airways fly the Najaf route under conditions through 28 October, including limits on passengers and cargo. Friday's statement does not say how long the new 40-flight exemption lasts, and it does not repeat the 28 October date.

Zaidi's office said the arrangement followed contacts aimed at restoring travel for medical treatment, religious visits, tourism and other civilian trips, and it thanked Washington for what it called a positive response. Zaidi said air links are a bridge between peoples, pointing to patients, pilgrims and families. Najaf is the practical point of that claim. The city holds the shrine of Imam Ali, and the airport was built largely for pilgrimage traffic from Iran. Forty flights a day is a high ceiling for a single Iraqi field. It is a cap, not a schedule. The statement does not say how many of those slots Iranian carriers will actually fly, or which airlines, beyond the exclusion of Mahan Air.

Mahan Air is the name left out, and the omission is the sanctions point. The carrier has been under US sanctions for years over alleged support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and arms movements. Keeping it off the Najaf list lets Washington reopen a pilgrimage route without reopening the airline most often named in those designations. Other Iranian carriers were caught in the 8 September package even when their business was passenger traffic. Friday's waiver is a carve-out from that package, limited to one airport and silent on cargo.

The 29 September waiver and the Friday waiver answer different complaints. Families in Iran who could not board an Iranian jet were not fully served by an Iraqi Airways monopoly on the route. Pilgrims travelling for Arbaeen and for ordinary visits to Najaf and Karbala move in groups, and the seats on one flag carrier do not cover that flow. Forty daily flights, if used, would. If the exemption expires with the 28 October licence and is not renewed, the window is measured in weeks. Baghdad did not say which clock applies.

The war context sits under the waiver. US sanctions on Iranian aviation tightened after the fighting that closed much of the Gulf's normal air pattern. Najaf is inland, west of the Iranian border, and the route does not need to cross the Strait of Hormuz. That geography is why a limited exemption is available at all. It is also why the exclusion list matters. A passenger flight into Najaf is harder to describe as a military movement than a cargo flight into a base. Washington has still kept Mahan out, which is the carrier critics have long accused of mixing the two.

What Baghdad has on paper is a ceiling of 40 daily movements, Iranian airlines except Mahan, at one airport, for civilian purposes it lists as medicine, pilgrimage and tourism. What it does not have is a published end date, a list of approved carriers, or a figure for how many of those 40 slots will be flown next week. The 28 October licence for Iraqi Airways remains the only dated instrument in the public record. Until Zaidi's office or the Treasury attaches a date to the wider waiver, the 40-flight claim is a permission whose length is still unknown.