Belarus will increase its economic and scientific relations with Iraq, the Belarussian foreign ministry said after a week-long visit by Iraq's minister for military industrialization, Abdul Tawab Mulla Howeish.
Belarus would help form a truck-producing line in Iraq, as well as assist Baghdad in updating its oil industry, the foreign ministry's spokesman Pavel Latushka told reporters Monday, according to AFP.
In addition, Belarussian technologies would be used to boost Iraq's health industry, Latushka said, adding that Baghdad also decided to increase the number of Iraqi students currently studying in the isolated former Soviet republic.
However, Latushka assured, all cooperation between Belarus and Iraq was strictly in the framework of the humanitarian oil-for-food program. Belarus exported about 26 million dollars (Euros) of goods to Iraq in the year 2001, up from 11.5 million dollars in the first five months of this year.
(Albawaba.com)
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