An Iraqi-American agreement to settle Iranian debts through food and medicine.
An Iraqi-American agreement to settle Iranian debts through food and medicine.
2026-07-27
Shafaq News – Baghdad
On Monday, Riyadh Adai, a member of the parliamentary electricity and energy committee, revealed an agreement between Iraq and the United States to pay Iran’s financial dues for gas by supplying it with goods and commodities, including food and medicine, instead of transferring the money in cash.
Adai told Shafaq News Agency that “Iran is demanding about $11 billion from Iraq, and part of this amount is currently in the Iraqi Trade Bank, but it cannot be transferred due to the US sanctions imposed on Iran.”
He added that “there are ongoing dialogues between the Iraqi and Iranian delegations to resolve the issue of these funds and to resume pumping Iranian gas to Iraqi power plants.”
The governor of the Central Bank of Iran, Abdolnaser Hemmati, announced last Thursday the amount of Iranian financial dues owed by Baghdad for natural gas and electricity exports that Iraq imports from Iran.
Hemmati told Iranian television that this issue was discussed as a key topic during talks with the governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, Nizar Nasser Hussein, on the sidelines of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi’s visit to Tehran.
He confirmed that the Iranian Central Bank has about $7 billion deposited in Iraq, in addition to more than $3 billion owed to the Iranian Ministry of Oil, bringing the total amount owed to Iran by the Iraqi government and banks to between $10 and $11 billion.
According to the bilateral agreements, the Iraqi government deposits the value of gas and electricity imports into accounts at the Central Bank of Iraq and the Iraqi Trade Bank.
The original contracts stipulated that the value of the gas would be paid in euros, and the value of the electricity in dollars. However, the withdrawal of the United States from the nuclear agreement in 2018, and the re-imposition of sanctions on Iran, prevented Iraq from paying these debts in foreign currencies, which led to their accumulation within the Iraqi banking system, with restrictions imposed on the mechanisms for their use.
shafaq.com
