Iraq Council of Ministers imposes 40% additional customs duty on tile/ceramic adhesives; lifts import-license requirements for motor oils and used vehicle spare parts

Mechanism

The Council of Ministers, under Law No. 11 of 2011 (Law for the Protection and Support of National Products), added tile and ceramic adhesive materials to the growing list of imported product categories carrying a stacked additional duty on top of the base tariff schedule — 40% of the unit customs value, applied to all countries of origin, running four years without reduction, and subject to domestic-market-conditions review during that period. The same decree eliminated import-licensing requirements (previously required at federal border crossings) for two unrelated product categories: motor oils/lubricants of all types (contingent on national quality-standard compliance) and used vehicle spare parts (contingent on radiation-clearance certification) — a deregulatory move bundled into the same tariff-raising session, consistent with the mixed protectionist/liberalising pattern seen in other 2025 Iraqi cabinet sessions (see 2025-04-16 PET-roll and transparent- container duties).

Severity is set low-moderate (2/5): the duty is real and quantified (40%) but the product category (construction-sector tile adhesives) is narrow and non-strategic compared to the food-security or industrial-input actions elsewhere in this theme.

Downstream implications

• Landed cost of imported tile/ceramic adhesive rises materially for Iraqi

construction and renovation markets from 20 November 2025; likely favors domestic Iraqi adhesive producers under the Law No. 11 protection regime.

• The motor-oil and used-spare-parts license eliminations cut compliance

friction for auto-aftermarket importers — a rare deregulatory data point inside an otherwise duty-raising Iraqi cabinet cycle.

• Consistent with the broader pattern in iraq-2025-26-fiscal-tariff-reform:

the Sudani government reaching for narrow, stacked additional-duty decrees across unrelated product categories in the same legislative weeks, ahead of the comprehensive Cabinet Decision 957 tariff-schedule rebracketing in December 2025.

Open questions

• Whether the four-year non-reduction commitment is renewed, extended, or

folded into the Decision 957 schedule once it takes full effect.

• Scale of actual trade volume affected — no import-value figure was

disclosed in either the primary decree text or GTA's tracking.