TEHRAN - The Iraqi government announced on Thursday it had no prior knowledge of the U.S. and Saudi strikes on positions of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), contradicting U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that the operation had been coordinated with Baghdad.

Government spokesperson Haider Al-Aboudi said in a media interview that the government “had no knowledge of the strikes and did not give approval to any party to carry out these attacks”.

He stressed that the government “will not allow Iraqi territory to become a stage for military operations without its knowledge and without the approval of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces”.

In the joint U.S.-Saudi attacks on several locations across Iraq, 20 PMF members were killed and about 30 others injured.

Trump claimed the strikes “were carried out in coordination with the Iraqi government”, according to a Fox News correspondent.

Trump is famous for his lies and misleading information.

Examples of false or misleading statements by Trump even during his second term have been documented by fact-checkers. These often involve exaggerations of economic achievements, foreign policy successes, immigration, crime, health claims, and continued assertions about elections.

For example, in his first 10 months or so of presidency, he repeatedly claimed to have “ended eight wars”. But these were often incomplete, temporary, or involved ongoing violence/violations; the tally has been widely rated as exaggerated.  He also made repeated claims that the U.S. military “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in a 2025 operation. His assertions proved fundamentally wrong.

Through his claim that the Iraqi government knew of the attacks in advance, Trump intends to put Iraqi political factions against each other to destabilize the country. In this way, Trump primarily seeks to suggest that the Iraqi prime minister is not only not unhappy with the attacks on the MPF’s positions, but also agrees with them.

It seems that treacherous and deceitful Trump is not happy with a stable and prosperous Iraq. His fellow Republican President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the false claim that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, a sheer lie that just brought death and destruction in Iraq and led to the spread of terrorism in Iraq and the wider region.

The fact that the Iraqi prime minister suspended his visit to Saudi Arabia shows that the Iraqi government is angry about the attack and disproves Trump’s claim.

Meanwhile, a senior government source told Shafaq News on Friday that reports that Prime Minister Al-Zaidi had threatened to resign were “completely untrue”.

The source said the report is intended to weaken the prime minister’s position.

Several reports had cited unnamed political sources alleging that the prime minister threatened to step down because his demands were not being addressed. Among them, Al Araby TV quoted a source from the Shiite Coordination Framework, parliament’s largest bloc that nominated Al-Zaidi, linking the alleged dispute to armed factions’ refusal to surrender their weapons.