Iraq completed the staged reopening of its three Iranian border crossings on Thursday 17 September, finishing with al-Sheeb in Maysan province1. The Security Media Cell had published the phased schedule on 13 September, and it has now run to completion without interruption.
The same province is where the drone launches originated, and no Iraqi government statement or wire report reached this week has named a group over them. An Iraq-Iran joint inquiry into the launch platforms continues and has published no finding. That silence is the operative fact rather than a gap in the reporting: as long as no state-attributable actor is formally named, no government in the region is obliged to respond to one, and the crossings can reopen on a commercial timetable instead of a security one.
Traffic through al-Sheeb matters chiefly to the towns on either side of it, but the sequencing tells you what Baghdad thinks the risk is. A government expecting an attribution that forces its hand does not finish reopening a border in the province the drones flew from.
