This paper reviews several arguments for the existence of a consonantal root in Iraqi Arabic, as well as introduces one novel argument in the form of voicing assimilation directionality reversals. These arguments are paired with a discussion of recent proposals for root-and-pattern morphologies by researchers working in Optimality Theory to show the usefulness of prosodic generalizations in explaining these phenomena without the need to fully eschew the existence of the consonantal root. The resulting analysis thus utlizes both the insights of the early work on nonconcatenative templatic morphology based on autosegmental association as well as recent approaches to show that a solution to such systems exists that takes the root to be real, yet derives the pattern system via emergent prosodic templates. Finally, a representative set of Iraqi Arabic verbal forms are derived in the proposed framework.