Cement, lime, blocks, bricks, roof tiles and terrazzo have all sat on Iraq’s prohibited-import list, the cement ban dating to 2013 and restated by the standards body as recently as 2024. For a building products manufacturer that removes most of the commodity range before any commercial question arises. We establish which of your lines can lawfully enter, then find the firms that can carry them.
Begin with what cannot arrive. A Council of Ministers decision announced in May 2013 and implemented that July barred the import of all cement other than white, and no revocation has been recorded. The standards body restated it in a letter of January 2024, which is how it appears on the conformity programme’s banned-products list alongside quicklime and hydrated lime, structural blocks, building brick, roofing concrete tile, terrazzo tile, lightweight modular construction and asbestos products. We read that list in its September 2024 edition; a later one exists which we could not obtain, so treat this as the position as last verified rather than as today’s certainty, and check your own codes.
What that leaves is the specified end of the range, and it is a real market: construction chemicals, insulation and sandwich panel, cladding and aluminium systems, fixings, plumbing and sanitary ware, electrical cable and accessories, pipe, flooring and tile, and steel. All of those sit inside the pre-shipment conformity programme, which means a certificate issued before loading by a body the standards organisation has appointed, and which means the certificate is a condition of customs clearance rather than a nicety.
Steel occupies its own position. Reinforcement bar is not prohibited; it is protected. In April 2025 the Council of Ministers imposed an additional protective customs duty on bar between ten and thirty-two millimetres, under the tariff law, explicitly to shield domestic production. We have seen that rate reported three different ways and will not repeat any of them — what matters commercially is that the direction of travel on steel is protective, and that the measure was framed as temporary with a review of import trends and domestic capacity attached.
The whole tariff schedule was replaced at the end of 2025 by a cabinet decision covering ninety-nine chapters and around sixteen thousand four hundred items, with rates from half a percent to thirty and industrial raw materials at the bottom of that range. It is being challenged on constitutional grounds by members of parliament who argue that taxes may only be imposed by law. It remains in effect while that runs, which is an uncomfortable but accurate thing to tell a pricing committee.
What remains addressable is the specified end of the range — construction chemicals, insulation, cladding, fixings, plumbing, electrical, flooring, pipe and steel — and those are squarely inside the pre-shipment conformity programme. A certificate of conformity from a body the standards organisation has appointed is required for customs clearance, and the standards behind it move: new Iraqi standards for clay brick and for reinforcement bar took effect in June 2025. Rebar is not banned but it is protected: in April 2025 an additional protective duty was imposed on bar between ten and thirty-two millimetres.
There is a second mark, and it behaves differently. The Iraqi Quality Mark is separate from and additional to the conformity certificate, and it has been rolled out across electrical products, with a grace period that ended in September 2025 after which non-compliant electrical shipments are turned away at destination. The asymmetry is the thing to understand: a conformity certificate can be applied for by the exporter or the importer, while the quality mark is the manufacturer’s obligation and involves an audit of your factory. One of these your distributor can carry for you. The other it cannot.
We will be straight about a limitation here. There is no usable public map of the private channel in this market. No named body publishes a merchant count, a list of significant distributors, and nothing dividing the trade between merchants, specialists and direct-to-project supply. Every search for one returns scraped directories or paywalled vendor landing pages. We would rather say that than present a channel diagram nobody can check.
What is documented is the state’s position in the channel, and it is substantial. There are state-owned producers in cement, iron and steel, and glass and refractories. There is a state trading arm which since October 2026 has been selling rebar, cement, brick and sanitary and electrical materials directly to citizens through sales centres in Baghdad and the provinces, for cash or on two-year instalments, following a construction basket scheme launched the previous year with the private sector. And there is a procurement preference: on the US State Department’s account of a 2009 decision, agencies must buy from state-owned enterprises unless those cannot meet quality or quantity, and the enterprises win within ten per cent of a competing bid while being exempt from bid and performance bonds.
The Kurdistan Region is the other structural fact. Six cement factories there produce around nineteen million tonnes a year and sell roughly three quarters of it into central and southern Iraq — that is, into the market an importer is barred from. The Region is described by its own investment board as largely self-sufficient in construction materials and looking for export markets. Any plan to use Kurdistan as a way into Iraq has to reckon with the fact that Kurdistan is already supplying Iraq, and competing with you rather than routing for you.
Read this list as two lists. Your factory audit, and the quality mark that depends on it, cannot be handed to anyone. Everything else below is what a resident firm brings — beginning with the right to import at all, and ending with the paperwork that keeps a warehouse trading.
Half of these establish whether an Iraqi business exists for your product at all. Only then is it worth asking who should run it.
Before anything else, take your customs codes and check them against the current banned-products list and the regulated-products list. If your range is cement, lime, block, brick, roof tile or terrazzo, the commercial conversation does not start. Use the current edition: we read the September 2024 banned list and the product list has been revised since.
A conformity certificate can be obtained by exporter or importer. The quality mark is a manufacturer obligation with a factory audit and, on the published account, a branch registration in Iraq behind it. Work out which of your lines need which, because one is delegable and the other is not.
The standards organisation appoints the inspection bodies and does not publish a consolidated list of them. Ask the candidate which body it uses and verify that the appointment is live, rather than taking a certificate at face value because it carries a recognisable name.
The provinces oversaw well over half of the public building and construction contracts let in 2025. A plan built around the construction ministry is aimed at under a tenth of the activity. Ask a candidate which governorates it actually sells into and who it knows there.
Where no budget is enacted, spending is limited to a twelfth of the previous year’s actual expenditure each month, which funds salaries and existing commitments and does not fund new capital projects. A parliamentary committee counted more than eighteen hundred stalled public projects in July 2026. Public demand in this market is a function of the budget calendar more than of need.
In October 2026 the standards organisation ran a joint campaign with the interior ministry’s organised crime directorate, national security and the trade ministry on building materials warehouses in west Baghdad, and found several lacking required registration documents; owners signed undertakings not to sell the goods until they regularised. Ask a candidate whether it has been inspected, and what was found.
Ask which bank, which correspondent, and whether dollar access has ever been restricted. Iraq was added to the FATF increased-monitoring list in June 2026. Separately, government contracts must be performed in dinars unless backed by an external letter of credit or foreign financing, which shapes how a public-sector sale is structured.
Federal customs moved onto a new electronic system at the start of 2026 and companies registered only in the Region reported difficulty shipping into federal Iraq. Agreements to extend the system to Kurdish crossings and to split border revenue were reached during 2026 but the crossings were not yet formally linked. There is also a reported directive requiring American concrete institute codes on Kurdish investment projects, which if it holds means a product specified to European or Iraqi codes may not be accepted there. We would verify that one locally before relying on it either way.
A manufacturer builds a plan around cement or block, appoints a partner, and finds the category has been prohibited since 2013. The information is public but it sits in a conformity programme’s banned-products annex rather than anywhere a commercial team would look.
The conformity certificate is delegable and the quality mark is not. Electrical suppliers in particular have discovered this at the point where shipments began being refused at destination after the grace period closed in September 2025, which is late to be arranging a factory audit.
The October 2026 inspection campaign in west Baghdad is the clearest recent illustration. It was not a material conformity failure — it was missing registration documents at the distributor’s premises, and the consequence was goods frozen on an undertaking not to sell. Your stock sits in those warehouses.
Trading proceeds for a year or two and then the relationship ends, at which point the agreement turns out not to be recognised before Iraqi authorities and enforceable by neither side. Registration is what makes the arrangement exist, and it has to be renewed every year.
The federal law requires good cause to terminate or refuse renewal and contains no compensation formula, so a claim would run on general civil code damages. What good cause means has not been tested in any decision we could find. And the law does not apply in the Kurdistan Region, which on the available sources still operates the repealed 2000 law — though those sources date from 2017 and 2018 and we could not confirm the position is unchanged.
US companies have reported large unpaid balances on Kurdistan public tenders, some dating to 2014, with deposits frozen in state-owned banks, on the US State Department’s own account. Federal arrears are less well documented but contractors’ recurring complaint under the previous contracting rules was late government payment. Retention and payment terms are negotiated here, not statutory.
Not into federal Iraq, on the evidence we have. A Council of Ministers decision announced in May 2013 and implemented that July barred all cement other than white, and no revocation is recorded. The standards body restated it by letter in January 2024 and it appears as active on the conformity programme’s banned list in the edition we read, dated September 2024. A later edition exists that we could not obtain, so verify against the current list before acting — but plan on the ban rather than on the exception.
The certificate of conformity is consignment-based, issued before shipment by a body the standards organisation appoints, and required for customs clearance; the programme documents allow either the exporter or the importer to apply. The Iraqi Quality Mark is separate and additional, granted under instructions dating from 2011, carries a QR code, and involves an audit of the manufacturing facility. On the published account it also involves registering the manufacturer as a branch in Iraq. In short: one your partner can handle, one you cannot delegate.
In regulatory terms, historically yes. The Region has its own standards authority and has operated its own conformity certificate programme, and its company registration is separate. We could not verify the current operation of either from anything newer than 2015 documents, and we would not tell you a Kurdish certificate is required or that Kurdish entry points are exempt from the federal programme without checking. What is clear is that customs are being unified rather than unified: agreements were reached during 2026 but the crossings were not yet formally linked.
For public work, the Ministry of Planning writes the standard bidding and contract documents, which other contracting parties treat as mandatory and rarely negotiate, and it classifies contractors and keeps the blacklist. But the buying is overwhelmingly provincial: of 2,279 public building and construction contracts in 2025, provincial administrations oversaw 1,406. So the specification conversation is national and the relationship conversation is governorate by governorate.
Under the 2017 federal law, goods for trading may be imported only through a registered commercial agent, and that registration is renewed annually. The agent must be Iraqi, and on the published reading a corporate agent must be entirely Iraqi-owned. There is a separate route for signing government contracts, where a foreign entity opens an Iraqi branch or incorporates locally. Those two things are often conflated and they are different: the contract leg and the import leg have different answers.
More than most markets, and it is the constraint worth most attention. The central bank closed its dollar auction platform in January 2025 and international payment now runs through each commercial bank’s own correspondent relationships; more than thirty Iraqi banks have been blocked from dollar clearing, and the partial easing in July 2026 restored non-dollar channels to a small number of them. Iraq was added to the FATF increased-monitoring list in June 2026. The identity and standing of your distributor’s bank is a commercial term, not an administrative detail.
What can lawfully enter, which of the two marks applies, and whether the buyer is a ministry or a province are three questions that decide the shape of an Iraqi entry before any partner is chosen.
How we verify How a distributor search runs