[1] Its purpose is to promote cultural development of the Iraqi Shia community and manage heritage belonging to it including mosques, shrines, libraries, schools, and other real estate.
[4] The President of each Office should be appointed by the Head of the Government, but the Atabat law of 2005 stated that the major decisions concerning the Shiite endowment, as the appointment of the President of the office, should be approved by the Great Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as a representative of Shiites, while noting the lack of a similar authority among the Iraqi Sunnis.
[8] In December 2005 the so-called Atabat law conceded to the Shiite endowment the administration of the five major Iraqi Shrines of Shia, but was contested by the president of Sunni Endowment Office al-Sumarrai, who claimed that they had been administrated until then by Sunni families, as in particular the Shrine of Samarra, thus opening a legal dispute which ended in 2012 confirming the assignment to the Shiite Waqf.
[8] A second legal Committee was created in 2008 in order to resolve the disputes concerning the sites claimed by both the confessions, but it stalled when the Shiite endowment office contested the validity of the documents dating back to Saddam Hussein.
[8] In recent times, during the civil war, some disputes concerning ancient mosques in Baghdad with vestiges of both Islamic confessions, and thus not clearly recognized as belonging to only one of them, had been finally resolved in favor of Shiite Waqf.