“Our goods exports to Iraq, excluding gas and electricity, were worth $1.6 billion in the last two months of this year. This means that our monthly goods export to Iraq is $800 million,” Said Hamid Husseini told Rudaw.
“Last year, the trade ties with the Kurdistan Region were not good. I mean, out of the $10 billion worth of goods exported to Iraq, nearly $2.5 billion were for the Kurdistan Region,” the official said.
He attributed what he considered low trade volume to the Kurdish government’s independence in some sectors, including electricity - unlike Iraq which buys millions of dollars of gas and electricity from Iran annually.
Rebar and steel are one of the main products Iran exports to Iraq.
“The Kurdistan Region has many rebar factories and has reached independence in this regard. I mean the Region does not have to import rebar and steel,” Husseini said.
Though the Kurdistan Region is self-sufficient in some areas, it is heavily reliant on imports from Iran and Turkey for many commodities.
There are multiple border crossings between the Kurdistan Region and Iran, but only three are internationally recognized: Bashmakh and Parwezkhan in Sulaimani province and Haji Omran in Erbil province.
Dozens of businesses and the Erbil Chamber of Commerce called for a boycott of Iranian products in protest of Tehran’s deadly missile attacks on the Kurdish capital in January.
The Kurdistan Region and Iran enjoy good economic relations. During a forum in Sulaimani in April, the President Nechirvan Barzani said that Iran contributed to the economic “success” of the Kurdistan Region.
President Barzani visited Tehran in May and met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, late President Ebrahim Raisi, and late Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
The trip was aimed at reassuring Erbil’s allies that the Kurdistan Region will not become a source of threat to the interests of its neighbors, especially Iran.
His visit “had a major and direct role in returning the relationship to its normal form, and the evidence of this is the exchange of visits and the presence of delegations between the two countries, and on top of that is the visit of the [acting] foreign minister to the Kurdistan Region,” Mohammad Kazem Al-e Sadeq, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad, told Rudaw.
Husseini also said that President Barzani’s visit to Tehran contributed to the normalisation of ties between Erbil and Tehran.
