---
title: "Iraq Bans Waze for Being Israeli, Tells Users to Switch to Google Maps"
description: "Baghdad’s suggested alternative to the Israeli-founded app is Google Maps — same owner, same crowdsourced data"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-09T07:48:15Z
modified: 2026-10-09T10:43:36Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/iraq-bans-waze-for-being-israeli-tells-users-to-switch-to-go-4b23d4
language: en
tags: ["waze", "israel", "data", "security", "infrastructure", "mideast"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Iraq Bans Waze for Being Israeli, Tells Users to Switch to Google Maps

*Baghdad’s suggested alternative to the Israeli-founded app is Google Maps — same owner, same crowdsourced data*

By Luis Goa · October 9, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/iraq-bans-waze-for-being-israeli-tells-users-to-switch-to-go-4b23d4

## In brief

- Iraq’s communications minister says Waze will be blocked by end of December 2026, moved up from an earlier 2027 start date
- Waze was built in Israel by veterans of the IDF’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit and bought by Google in 2013
- Google’s 2022 merger of Waze into its Geo division means Google Maps already shows Waze’s crowdsourced traffic reports
- Iraq’s 2022 anti-normalization law sets penalties up to life imprisonment or death for ties with Israel
- Iraq blocked Telegram nationwide in 2023 and again in April 2026, when VPN downloads rose 1,200% in days

Iraq’s Ministry of Communications says it will stop people in Iraq from using Waze by the end of December. Communications Minister Mustafa Sanad told the broadcaster Rudaw on October 7 that the reason is simple: “It \[Waze\] is from the entity \[Israel\]; it was created in Israel. We will ban the usage of the application in Iraq at the beginning of 2027,” he [said](https://rudaw.net/english/categories/iraq/1079610). The 2027 date lasted about as long as it took social media to notice the suggested replacement — Google Maps, owned by the same company as Waze. Sanad then moved the deadline up on Facebook: “We have decided to revoke our earlier decision to ban the Waze app at the start of 2027 and instead move the effective date to the end of this coming December,” he wrote, according to [The New Region](https://thenewregion.com/posts/6732).

Waze’s Israeli origin is not in dispute, and neither is its mechanism. What became Waze started in 2006 as FreeMap Israel, a volunteer project the Tel Aviv engineer Ehud Shabtai built to crowdsource a free road map after getting a GPS unit with no live traffic data. By 2008 Shabtai had turned it into a company, Waze Mobile, with two co-founders, Amir Shinar and Uri Levine, both veterans like him of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals-intelligence corps. The thing that made Waze different from incumbents like TomTom and Garmin was never classified: phones report position and speed continuously, drivers report hazards — crashes, police, speed traps — by hand, and the aggregate of those reports reroutes everyone else in close to real time.

Google bought Waze Mobile in June 2013. Alphabet’s own [10-K filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001288776/000128877614000020/goog2013123110-k.htm) puts the price at $969 million in cash — $841 million booked as goodwill, $193 million as intangible assets, net of $65 million in assumed liabilities. Most contemporaneous press coverage cited a round $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, a gap usually attributed to retention stock and bonuses for Waze’s roughly 100 employees, who split what was at the time Israeli tech’s largest single payout, averaging about $1.2 million a head. Waze had 50 million users worldwide when the deal closed.

Waze’s current user count is harder to pin down than its purchase price, because the company no longer publishes one consistent global number; its own marketing has claimed anywhere from 130 million to 150 million monthly users over the past five years. The only audited figure comes from Brussels. Waze reported 50.5 million average monthly users in the European Union for July to December 2024, a filing that pushed it over the 45-million threshold the EU’s Digital Services Act uses to flag a “very large online platform,” subject to stricter advertising and content rules. A European Commission spokesman, Thomas Regnier, confirmed the Commission was “aware that Waze has published user numbers above the DSA threshold,” but as of [March 2026 the designation itself was still under discussion](https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/google-waze-dsa-600847), with Google arguing Waze doesn’t meet the law’s definition of a platform at all.

## One phone, two Israeli-born apps

Sanad’s suggested replacement for Waze is itself the argument against his ban. Google Maps was also built in part on Israeli mapping engineering, and it has shared a management structure with Waze since Alphabet folded both products, plus Google Earth, into one Geo division in 2022. That merger wasn’t cosmetic: Google Maps now surfaces the same crowdsourced hazard reports — accidents, lane closures, speed traps — that Waze users submit, running on the same Google Cloud backend, [BGR reported](https://www.bgr.com/2035531/google-maps-waze-problem-ownership/) in an analysis of exactly this ownership overlap. A checkpoint flagged by a Waze user in Baghdad can show up in a Google Maps user’s app in Baghdad minutes later, under a different icon, on a service Sanad hasn’t proposed touching.

**Banning one app, not its twin** How a Waze report in Iraq still reaches Google Maps

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Driver's phone, Iraq | Waze app *(to be blocked, Dec 2026)* | GPS + hazard reports |
| Waze app *(to be blocked, Dec 2026)* | Waze backend, Google Cloud | uploads |
| Waze backend, Google Cloud | Google Geo division *(Waze + Maps + Earth merged, 2022)* | folded in, 2022 |
| Google Geo division *(Waze + Maps + Earth merged, 2022)* | Google Maps app *(stays legal)* | shares traffic data |
| Google Maps app *(stays legal)* | Driver's phone, Iraq | same reports |

![Banning one app, not its twin. How a Waze report in Iraq still reaches Google Maps](https://rews.cc/img/5c8542cf3409b549e87ee35718aa528b896f4f55.webp)

Based on [Alphabet corporate structure, per BGR reporting](https://www.bgr.com/2035531/google-maps-waze-problem-ownership/)

The ministry’s Facebook post filled with the obvious joke within hours. Commenters cited by [The National](https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/10/07/iraq-to-ban-waze-navigation-app-over-israeli-links/), including Ali Al Askari and Duraid Al Saffar, argued respectively that the app benefits ordinary Iraqis more than it benefits the minister, and that Baghdad should finish building a domestic alternative before switching Waze off. The post drew hundreds of comments within hours, most of them critical.

> Such applications help to wipe Gaza off the map.

## Iraq’s enforcement record is porous

Iraq has done this before, and the record is not encouraging for anyone hoping the block will hold. In August 2023 the Ministry of Communications ordered Zain and Earthlink, the country’s two largest internet providers, to block Telegram nationwide — everywhere except the autonomous Kurdistan region — after the company ignored a request to remove channels doxxing Iraqi families, according to [NetBlocks](https://netblocks.org/reports/telegram-restricted-in-iraq-over-personal-data-leaks-9AkJ4o8D). The block held for about a week, applied only to users without a VPN, and was lifted after pro-Iran factions, who use Telegram as a propaganda channel, objected.

Iraq tried again in April 2026, blocking Telegram in six cities — Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Saladin, Kirkuk and Diyala, again sparing Kurdistan — to disrupt Iran-aligned armed factions coordinating drone attacks during the wider Iran war, [Shafaq News reported](https://shafaq.com/en/society/Iraq-blocks-Telegram-to-curb-armed-group-activity). VPN downloads in Iraq rose 1,200% in the days that followed, [according to tracking cited by Mysterium VPN](https://www.mysteriumvpn.com/blog/news/iraq-banned-telegram-vpn-downloads-spiked), and the armed-group channels the ban targeted stayed reachable through them. Ordinary users absorbed the inconvenience the ban was meant to impose on militias. Iraq has separately declared VPN use illegal — a law enforced about as consistently as the app blocks it’s meant to reinforce.

## A law the minister hasn’t invoked

None of this touches the legal basis a reader might expect a Baghdad ban on an Israeli company to rest on: Iraq’s 2022 law criminalizing “normalization” with Israel, passed by its parliament 275 votes to 329, which sets penalties up to life imprisonment or death for any citizen, company or state institution that establishes a diplomatic, economic, political, military, security or cultural relationship with Israel, a country Iraq has never recognized and has been formally at war with since 1948, as [Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/9/why-has-iraq-decided-to-ban-online-map-service-waze) noted. Sanad has not invoked that law by name. Nor has his ministry said whether the Kurdistan Regional Government, which didn’t enforce either Telegram block, will apply the Waze ban; how it intends to block an app that, unlike Telegram, has no server an ISP can simply drop; or why Google Maps’s identical Alphabet ownership and overlapping Israeli engineering history don’t make it equally disqualifying.

Ministry spokesman Omar al-Amiri has said Waze will be replaced by a domestic app, as yet unnamed, that will run “without technical problems.” The Iraqi tech researcher Mustafa Kamel al-Sharif told the newspaper Al-Mada that a credible substitute needs more than a name: an accurate geographic database of Iraq’s roads, a working routing engine, and a continuously updated live feed of traffic, accidents and closures — the parts of Waze’s stack that took the company most of two decades and Google’s cloud infrastructure to build. Al-Sharif’s sharper point was that swapping one app for another leaves the underlying question unanswered: what Iraq actually requires any navigation service, foreign or domestic, to do with data on where its citizens go.

That data is not nothing. Waze’s privacy policy, depending on a user’s settings, already collects location, routes, destinations, search history and device identifiers — raw material from which movement patterns and anomalies can be reconstructed, which is the specific worry Rudaw has reported Iraqi security officials raised about the app’s crowdsourced checkpoint alerts. Banning Waze does not stop Google Maps from collecting a comparable data set from the same phones, under the same corporate roof, legally, after December. The number to watch isn’t the ban date, which has already moved once. It’s whether Iraq’s unnamed domestic app exists, with usable maps and an actual userbase, by the time the Waze block is supposed to take effect.

## See also

- [Iraq: Freedom on the Net 2024](https://freedomhouse.org/country/iraq/freedom-net/2024) — freedomhouse.org · Freedom House's assessment of Iraq's internet controls and shutdown history
- [Unit 8200](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the Israeli intelligence unit Waze's founders served in
- [Waze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze) — en.wikipedia.org · Company history and timeline from FreeMap Israel to Alphabet subsidiary
- [Waze might be designated as a Very Large Online Platform by EU Commission](https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2449864/waze-might-be-designated-as-a-very-large-online-platform-by-eu-commission) — mlex.com · Detail on the EU's pending DSA designation process for Waze