Iran Pressures Iraq to Restore Flights as US Sanctions Cripple Aviation Links

On September 23, the United States imposed sweeping sanctions on Iranian airlines, and within days the consequences rippled across Iraq's airspace. Ground-handling companies—the firms that service planes, load cargo, and manage passenger operations—refused to work with Iranian carriers, fearful that doing so would expose them to American penalties. By late September, flights between Iraq and Iran had largely vanished. Baghdad's main airport went silent. So did Erbil and Sulaimaniyah. Only Najaf, in the Shia-majority south, managed to restart service on Monday evening, a partial reprieve that Iran's government immediately deemed insufficient.

On Thursday, Iran's Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning what it called Washington's "illegal and inhumane" use of sanctions to strangle Iran's aviation sector through what it termed "extraterritorial enforcement"—the practice of penalizing foreign companies for doing business with Iranian entities. The ministry called on Iraq to remove all remaining restrictions and restore full air service between the two nations. The statement framed the issue in terms of basic human movement: millions of Iranian and Iraqi citizens needed to travel, it said, and resolving the dispute required Baghdad to act with independence and responsibility.

Iraq's government found itself caught between two pressures. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi had overseen the limited reopening at Najaf, and Iraq's ambassador to Iran, Yasser Abdulzahra al-Hajjaj, insisted that Baghdad had never formally decided to suspend Iranian flights—the suspensions, he suggested, were the result of private companies' fear of sanctions, not state policy. Yet the practical effect was the same. Passengers who would normally fly from Baghdad or Erbil to Iran now faced overland journeys of at least twelve hours. Pilgrims traveling to Shia holy sites in Iran found their routes blocked. The disruption sparked protests in Najaf, Nasiriya, Karbala, and Amarah, with crowds gathering outside airports and in city streets to voice their anger.

The scale of Iran's isolation became clear in the data. According to FlightRadar24, an aviation monitoring service, flights to and from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport had fallen by 42 percent since the sanctions took effect. Routes to Georgia, Oman, and Azerbaijan had ceased entirely. Service to Dubai was suspended. Flights to China remained stable, and the route to Turkey—Iran's busiest international air corridor—had declined by only 19 percent, though individual airlines were shifting their schedules unpredictably. The picture was one of a country systematically cut off from the world's air networks.

Iraq, seeking a way out of the impasse, had approached Washington with a request for humanitarian exemptions. The government asked the United States to carve out exceptions for medical treatment, education, religious visits, and civilian needs—a plea that acknowledged both the severity of the disruption and the possibility of negotiated relief. Whether such exemptions might materialize remained unclear. For now, the partial reopening at Najaf stood as a compromise that satisfied neither Tehran nor the millions of travelers stranded by the sanctions' reach.