BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani demanded Friday that Baghdad be seated as a full negotiating party at next week’s Marseille reconstruction conference and admitted to the Vienna nuclear track as an observer, warning that no aid package covering damage on Iraqi territory would be accepted unless it was routed through Iraqi ministries.

The intervention, delivered in a thirty-five-minute address to a hastily summoned joint session of the Council of Representatives, marked the sharpest assertion of sovereignty by an Iraqi government since the April 15 ceasefire and complicated a European-Gulf diplomatic architecture that has so far treated Iraq primarily as a beneficiary rather than a participant. Three of the six weeks of war between Iran and Israel saw missile, drone and rocket exchanges either originating from, traversing or landing on Iraqi soil, and U.S. casualty figures released last week showed that more than a third of the 357 American service members killed during the conflict died at bases inside Iraq.

“We will not be the table on which others eat,” al-Sudani told the chamber, in a phrase that within minutes was running across the chyron of state broadcaster Al-Iraqiya. “Iraqi soil was crossed without our permission. Iraqi lives were taken without our consent. The repair of Iraqi villages will not be negotiated without our signature.”

The French Foreign Ministry, which has spent the past ten days finalizing the Marseille guest list, responded within hours. A spokesperson at the Quai d’Orsay said Iraq had been invited as a full participant from the outset and would have “the speaking time, the working-group seats and the signatory authority of any state whose territory the conference addresses.” French officials privately conceded, however, that the original protocol had treated Baghdad’s delegation as observers in the reconstruction-financing track, a status the Iraqi foreign ministry formally rejected in a diplomatic note delivered to Paris on Thursday evening.

The Vienna question is harder. The post-ceasefire nuclear talks, which opened Tuesday at the Palais Coburg under Austrian auspices, include the P5+1 powers and Iran, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates joining this week as Gulf observers. Iraq has not been seated. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, asked by reporters in Vienna on Friday about al-Sudani’s demand, replied that Iran had “no objection in principle” to an Iraqi observer presence but that the structure of the talks was “a matter for the chair and the conveners.” A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington was “studying the request” but cautioned that adding observers mid-round was “logistically and procedurally delicate.”

The Iraqi push reflects domestic political pressure that has been building since the first independent damage assessments were published in mid-April. The Iraqi planning ministry’s preliminary report, released April 23, put war-related infrastructure damage at $31.4 billion, with the heaviest losses concentrated in Anbar, Nineveh and Basra provinces. A separate UN-led assessment circulated to donors last week estimated displacement at 480,000 Iraqis still unable to return to their home districts, the largest internal displacement total in the country since 2017.

“The prime minister cannot survive politically if Marseille is seen as a Gulf-European arrangement that pays for Iraqi reconstruction over Iraqi heads,” said Renad Mansour, who directs the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House. “He has a Sadrist bloc that is already accusing him of accepting foreign tutelage, a Kurdish coalition partner asking why Erbil is not at the table separately, and a Shia coordination framework that wants any IRGC-aligned reconstruction contracts protected. He had to plant the flag this week or he loses the file.”

Al-Sudani’s demand also reframes a quiet diplomatic argument that has been running between Baghdad and Riyadh since the Muscat contact-group meeting on Wednesday. Iraqi officials, briefing reporters in the Green Zone on Friday afternoon, said the $2.3 billion Gulf reconstruction trust fund announced in Muscat had been structured to disburse through the Islamic Development Bank and a yet-unnamed implementing partner, without an Iraqi co-signatory. “If the money lands in Anbar, the authority that lands it is Anbar’s governor and Baghdad’s finance ministry,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hisham al-Alawi told a small group of reporters. “Not a fund in Jeddah.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, traveling to Cairo on Friday for a pre-Marseille consultation with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, addressed the dispute briefly at the airport. “Iraq is a sovereign partner, not a recipient,” he said. “The architecture will reflect that.” Saudi officials privately said Riyadh was willing to add Baghdad as a co-signatory to the trust-fund agreement but wanted to preserve the Islamic Development Bank’s disbursement role to satisfy Gulf parliaments wary of routing money through a country with what one Saudi official called “porous procurement systems.”

The intervention has been received warmly in Tehran. Iranian state media on Friday evening framed al-Sudani’s address as “the voice of a region tired of being managed from abroad,” and President Masoud Pezeshkian called the Iraqi prime minister to express support, according to an Iranian foreign ministry readout. Western diplomats said Tehran’s enthusiasm was strategic as much as principled: an Iraqi seat at Vienna, with even observer status, would give Iran a regional ally inside a forum currently dominated by Western and Gulf voices.

Israel’s reaction was sharper. A senior Israeli official, briefing reporters in Jerusalem on condition of anonymity, said that any Iraqi role in Vienna “must not become a back door for Iranian positions” and warned that Israel would press Washington to reject observer status for any state hosting active Iranian-aligned militias. The official cited the Kataib Hezbollah rocket fired from Iraqi territory on April 17, two days into the ceasefire, as evidence that Baghdad had not yet reasserted full control over its own borders.

Inside the Council of Representatives, the speech drew unusual cross-bloc applause, with Sadrist, Shia coordination framework and Kurdish deputies all standing for portions of the address — a parliamentary tableau that has been rare in Baghdad since the 2022 government formation crisis. A vote endorsing the prime minister’s demands is expected next week.

French officials said a revised Marseille seating chart, reflecting Iraq’s elevated status, would be published in Paris early Sunday. Officials said additional details on the Vienna observer question would be addressed by the conference chair before talks resumed Monday.