Turkey to provide $5B loan to Iraq: FM

Turkey will provide around $5 billion in loans for the reconstruction of Iraq, the foreign minister said on Sunday.

“We made the biggest commitment to Iraq,” Mevlut Cavusoglu told a meeting organised by the Beyoglu Municipality in Istanbul.

“We will provide $5 billion credit,” Cavusoglu said, adding Turkish business people will utilise this loan for their projects in Iraq.

“We have already begun coordination of these works for the reconstruction of Iraq,” Cavusoglu added.

The top diplomat added that he is set to visit both, the Iraqi capital Baghdad and Erbil, the administrative capital of Kurdish regional government. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Iraq after local elections in Turkey slated for March 31.

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In 2017, Iraq was Turkey’s fourth largest export partner, according to the Foreign Ministry.

“Turkey’s bilateral trade volume with Iraq declined from 2014 to 2016 due to security problems in Iraq. In 2017, this trend has been reversed and the bilateral trade volume has increased,” the ministry said, adding that Turkey expected the trade volume to reach over $12 billion in the upcoming years.

In the summer of 2014, Daesh overran much of northern and western Iraq.

After a three-year war, the Iraqi government declared late in 2017 that Daesh’s military presence in Iraq had been all but ended through operations backed by a US-led international alliance.