Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. The price of the war is being negotiated in two places this morning: In whatever channel Washington and Tehran are now using, and in the fare tables airlines are drawing up for next summer.
The US and Iran are exploring a phased agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift Washington’s blockade on Iranian ports, as we note in this afternoon’s War Watch, below. One Iranian official framed it as solving the crisis in stages: Tehran gets relief from economic pressure, Washington gets lower fuel prices. Brent is trading around USD 105 and eased on the report, with Houthi missile fire toward Saudi cities keeping a floor under it.
Airfares will need to rise 10-20% next summer if oil stays where it is, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said, according to Reuters. Jet fuel rose 7.4% last week to USD 194.9 / bbl, more than double its 2025 average of USD 90, and Middle Eastern carriers flew 9.5% of global traffic last year into what is the industry's peak season.
Meanwhile, at least one of Washington’s spats is looking calmer, as Trump and Xi extended their trade truce by two months before they sat down. The expiry moves to 10 January, the New York Times reports, buying time to negotiate. The terms keep select US tariffs suspended in exchange for continued Chinese supply of rare earths.
Closer to home: Morocco has elected the parliament that will oversee the last stretch of its USD 20 bn World Cup build-out. The liberal, centrist PAM took 97 of 395 seats, up from 87, moving from junior coalition partner to first place, Reuters reports, on provisional results delivered by Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit.
The late addition that moved the scales: Fouzi Lekjaa, football federation chief and twice government budget manager, credited with the national team’s rise and with overseeing the 2030 infrastructure spend, who joined weeks before the vote and is now a leading candidate for prime minister — the king picks from the winning party, and PAM leader Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri is the other name in frame. Turnout fell to about 38% from roughly 50% five years ago — worth holding onto, given PAM campaigned on USD 37 bn and a mn jobs aimed squarely at youth discontent. –Salma
Saudi EXIM is using its expanding balance sheet to keep Saudi industry supplied. Since early 2025, the export bank has signed reins. agreements with export-credit agencies and insurers in the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy. Most of them cover capital goods and production inputs that Saudi companies import. It has also agreed to a USD 800 mn credit-ins. line with Trafigura that finances mining companies worldwide. The build-out predates the Iran conflict, but it carries more weight now that the cost of moving goods through the Gulf and Red Sea has risen.
“What EXIM is doing with critical-minerals insurance and foreign capital-goods access, securing supply chains for inputs before disruption hits, is forward-positioning,” Ahmad Chreim, economist at MT Trading, tells EnterpriseAM. “It’s Saudi Arabia using a strong balance sheet and a favorable credit rating proactively, to reduce future shock exposure rather than just manage it when it arrives.”
The balance sheet is growing. Saudi EXIM provided SAR 27.67 bn in credit facilities in 1H 2026, up 17.2% y-o-y, with insurance driving the increase. Exports covered by credit ins. rose 32% to SAR 19.47 bn, while export-financing disbursements slipped to SAR 8.20 bn from SAR 8.87 bn. Cumulative facilities reached about SAR 116 bn (USD 30.9 bn) by end-2025, according to the Vision 2030 annual report. Fitch gave the bank its first-ever rating in May 2025, an A+ equalized with the sovereign’s. The agency described the bank as an extension of the government’s diversification agenda.
The growth comes as Saudi industry leans harder on foreign markets and suppliers. Non-oil exports hit a record SAR 622.9 bn in 2025, though the Kingdom’s latest non-oil trade data showed a pullback. Saudi policy now has to address “how its industries secure inputs and supply chains, and how economic relationships reinforce broader bilateral relationships,” John Sfakianakis, chief economist and head of economic research at the Gulf Research Center, tells EnterpriseAM.Saudi EXIM files most of its reins. deals under its Bridges Initiative. The initiative aims to keep raw materials and capital goods flowing to Saudi companies. It opened in February 2025 with agreements with Allianz Trade, France’s Bpifrance, and AIG.
State agencies followed. Saudi EXIM signed a reins. agreement with US EXIM in April, building on a 2024 MoU. It covers US-sourced capital goods and production inputs for Saudi institutions. In February, the bank signed a reins. MoU with UK Export Finance covering capital goods and raw materials Saudi exporters source from the UK, extending a 2022 cooperation MoU. A January agreement with Euler Hermes, which runs Germany’s federal export-credit guarantees, covers German exports to Saudi Arabia and Saudi participation in international projects. The November 2025 deal with Italy’s SACE covers joint Italian-Saudi projects in third countries.
In each case, Saudi EXIM takes on part of a foreign agency’s risk. That makes it easier for Saudi buyers to finance foreign equipment and for foreign suppliers to take on Saudi business.
Minerals put EXIM inside the trade
TheTrafigura policy, signed in January, takes the bank further up the supply chain. It provides up to USD 800 mn of credit ins. for multi-year prepayment deals with mining companies globally, starting with a copper transaction. The relationship began with a USD 500 mn credit facility in 2023, raised to USD 700 mn in 2025.
Riyadh values its mineral resources at aboutSAR 9.4 tn (USD 2.5 tn)and wants processing and downstream industry built around them. “Saudi Arabia is increasingly positioning itself within the investment, financing, processing and trading architecture surrounding those commodities,” Sfakianakis says. “The most effective forms of economic statecraft are often precisely those transactions that are commercially defensible while simultaneously advancing longer-term national objectives.”
The bank’s Africa deals track Riyadh’s diplomacy. Saudi EXIM and the Kenya Development Corporation extended their cooperation agreement until December 2029 as part of a package from the first Saudi-Kenyan political consultations that also covered investment, customs and labor.
The bank’s lending is concentrated in industry and mining and closely tracks the National Industrial Strategy, Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, tells EnterpriseAM. That strategy targets a doubling of industrial exports by 2030. Geopolitics can still shape who the bank works with. “It is common practice, moreover, for Gulf leaders to steer the decisions of their national policy banks, state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds and aid agencies toward specific foreign partners,” he tells us.
Riyadh sees East Africa and the Horn as part of its strategic neighborhood, Alhasan says. “In Kenya, the commercial and strategic rationales point in the same direction, suggesting that a dual logic is at play.”
Other tools keep cargo moving
Riyadh is using other institutions to protect trade flows. PIF signed an agreement worth up to USD 15 bn with US EXIM in July to finance its portfolio companies’ purchases of American goods and services. This month, the Cabinet approved a national war-risk ins. pool for cargo and vessels. Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan described it as a public-private mechanism to keep trade and supply chains running.
“They do not need to be directing one another transaction by transaction for the overall effect to be coordinated,” Sfakianakis says. “I would describe the broader phenomenon as strategic alignment rather than bureaucratic direction.”
Another round of US-Iran Hormuz negotiations: US and Iranian negotiators in New York are exploring a phased agreement in which Tehran would reopen the strait and Washington would lift its naval blockade, with Qatar mediating. Brent slid toward USD 106/bbl on the reports. The sticking point is that neither side wants to give up its leverage first, and a similar sequenced understanding struck in June collapsed within weeks.
Tehran is willing to move its demand for transit fees into a side attachment, sources say, but not to give up control of the waterway. US President Donald Trump has floated an agreement after the 3 November midterms, while former US negotiator Dennis Ross puts the odds of one before the vote at 30%.
The negotiations come as travel routes across the region are being halted. Oman and Azerbaijan suspended all Iranian airline flights into their countries after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that all Iranian airlines would be shut down worldwide starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, Iraq has banned Iranian flights to its capital Baghdad after Washington imposed sanctions on services provided to Iran’s aviation sector and Georgia has suspended flights to Tbilisi, the Financial Times reports. Mahan Air has also dropped its Istanbul, Ankara, and Muscat routes. The UAE also suspended all flights by Iranian airlines to and from the country until further notice, the General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) said in a statement carried by Wam.
For the UAE, flights were one of the last threads left with Iran after Abu Dhabihaltedall trade, commercial exchange, and financial transactions with Tehran last month. The central bank tightened the financial side further on Wednesday, sanctioning Bank Melli’s UAE branches over money laundering and terror financing violations.
Lebanon is scrapping the import fee increase it introduced just weeks ago — a reversal that signals how thin Beirut’s tolerance is for tax measures that raise consumer prices in the middle of a fragile recovery. Finance Minister Yassine Jaber signed the draft decree on Monday, with the draft now with Cabinet for its sign-off.
How we got here: Earlier this summer, the Finance Ministry introduced a 2-3% levy on importers meant to boost state revenue and incentivize tax payment. Employers pushed back immediately, saying the measure had been taken without prior consultation. Inflation on imported goods — especially food, which saw 4-5% price rises — set off complaints from trade unions and households. The government suspended the decree by the end of June, pending review.
The pitch on reversal: Jaber framed the decision as a balancing act between protecting public revenues and shielding Lebanon’s industrial sector and jobs. It’s a politically potent framing in a country whose manufacturers have leaned heavily on cost stability to survive the aftermath of the 2019-2020 financial collapse — and a decision that will inevitably raise questions with the IMF, whose long-stalled program hinges on Beirut's ability to sustainably raise revenue.
The fiscal backdrop: Regional military escalation in March pushed the state’s budget deficit to LBP 4.2 bn (USD 46.9k), as expenses jumped 145% y-o-y, according to Blom Invest. That makes the reversal more striking — the government is choosing industrial protection over revenue even as its fiscal position deteriorates.
Bahrain’s oil has stopped paying its bills. The Iran war has cut the region’s crude output by nearly two-thirds, stripping out the revenue that serviced its debt load, with Bahrain pumping 68k and 65k barrels per day in July and August and just 44k in 2Q, according to OPEC data (pdf). By comparison, Bahrain’s 1Q 2026 output was around 97k bbl / d — itself a drop from 4Q 2025’s 161k bbl / d average. Hydrocarbons provide about half of state revenue and exports, but form only 15% of the country’s GDP, S&P says.
This year’s debt payments are manageable, but the picture is less clear starting next year: Bahrain can cover the USD 1.1 bn of foreign-currency debt due in 2026, Oxford Economics Senior Economist David Stewart tells AGBI. “Beyond this year, the position becomes more difficult,” Stewart says, as repayments rise to USD 2.7 bn each in 2027 and 2028 and USD 4.5 bn in 2029, according to its June offering circular. S&P’s May forecast of a deficit of 8.4% of GDP assumed output of 130k bbl / d, roughly double what is flowing now. Bahrain’s real GDP shrank 3.8% y-o-y in 1Q 2026 on a 37% drop in oil activity.
Debt servicing now absorbs more than a third of revenue: Bahrain spent USD 2.8 bn (37% of revenue) on debt interest payments and its 2026 budget implies that number going up to USD 3.1 bn this year. That’s more than the USD 2.6 bn of external debt maturing in 2026. Behind those payments sits USD 60 bn of government debt, which Fitch put at 147% of GDP last year when it cut Bahrain’s rating to ‘B’ in February, before the war, on the expectation that the ratio would keep rising. The war has sped that up: the ratio could top 200% this year if exports don’t recover, Khalij Economics’ Justin Alexander says.
What markets are charging: The USD 1 bn 10-year bond that Bahrain sold in June at a 7.1% coupon now yields 8.3%, and Bahraini spreads sit 215-265 bps above Abu Dhabi’s, Arqaam Capital’s Nadim Amatouri says.
Microsoft will invest more than USD 10 bn across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait by 2030, focusing on cloud and AI infrastructure, a senior company executive tells Reuters. The breakdown of investment per country or project was not disclosed. Digital resilience was put forth by the company as a strategic priority for the region amid ongoing regional instability.
The scale of the commitment signals Big Tech’s deepening bet on Gulf sovereign digitization agendas with investments continuing as planned since before the war according to Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. Microsoft is cooperating with national AI companies including UAE’s G42, Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai.
GCC countries have been pouring investment into AI development and cybersecurity defense especially after geopolitical turmoil saw attacks on data centers in the UAE along with rising cybersecurity attacks and credible threats. As early as April 2024, Microsoft made a strategic investment of USD 1.5 bn in Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud computing firm G42, tethering the region harder to US technologies.
The world’s biggest managers are putting money and people into the region. EQT opened its Middle East platform in ADGM, and BlackRock said it will steer up to USD 100 bn of international deployment here, on top of the USD 30 bn GCC platform GIP already runs with L’Imad, Adnoc, and Temasek. Riyadh is working on the plumbing to take it: The CMA wants underwriters on the hook for unsold shares and banks to verify that orders are backed by real liquidity.
EQT has opened its first Middle East office and wants to deploy from it. The Swedish private-markets group, which manages USD 389 bn, has launched its regional platform out of Abu Dhabi, it said, and expects to build a broader GCC platform over time. EQT will invest across private equity and infrastructure, work more closely with portfolio companies already operating here — Nord Anglia Education, Virtusa, Banking Circle, Nothing, and SAUR — and hunt new transactions in sectors tied to national agendas, including healthcare, education, digital and AI infrastructure, industrials, and the energy transition.
Who’s running it: Jimmy Mahtani (LinkedIn) is GCC chairman on top of chairing India and Southeast Asia for EQT Private Capital. Smiyet Belrhiti (LinkedIn) will lead the Abu Dhabi office.
A Qatari bank wants USD 1 bn sitting next to BlackRock’s. Lesha Bank plans to invest more than USD 1 bn alongside BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) — a fifth of the c. USD 5.3 bn it manages — under an MoU signed at the Qatar Economic Forum, Qatar News Agency reports. It names no assets or timeline.
GIP is building a bench. The pair have co-invested before, and Group CEO Mohammed Ismail Al Emadi calls infrastructure “a strategic priority.” Lesha’s last disclosed infrastructure deal was c. QAR 182 mn (USD 50 mn) in December, a twentieth of the GIP figure. It launched a USD 30 bn GCC and Central Asia platform with L’Imad, Adnoc, and Temasek, and BlackRock said this week it will steer up to USD 100 bn to the Middle East. Lesha’s ticket is small, but it puts a listed bank on a list of state-backed partners.
Saudi Arabia wants underwriters on the hook for IPOs that don’t sell. The Capital Market Authority is proposing an overhaul of listing rules that would make underwriters commit to taking up unsold shares, require banks to verify that orders are backed by real liquidity, and require issuers to disclose forecasts. Public comments are open until 22 October.
Why it matters: The proposals go at book quality rather than book size, and an underwriter obliged to own what it can’t place prices a deal differently. That matters most to the money arriving from outside: Foreign holdings on the exchange reached SAR 461.5 bn at the end of August, after the Kingdom opened its market to all foreign investors in February, and Gulf IPO volumes are at their weakest in years.
PIF is adding fixed income to the list of things it pays outsiders to run. Pimco is set to receive its first allocation from the Public Investment Fund, a Gulf bond mandate of c. USD 500 mn, Bloomberg reports. It would be the manager’s debut mandate from the fund.
MGX is about to take the AI data center trade outside the Americas. The BlackRock and MGX-backed AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) and Australia’s IFM Investors are in exclusive talks to buy Stack Infrastructure’s Asia Pacific portfolio — sites in Tokyo, Osaka, Sydney, Melbourne, and Johor Bahru — in a deal that could value it at USD 20-25 bn, Bloomberg reports. That is a haircut of up to a third on the more than USD 30 bn owner Blue Owl was initially seeking. The buyers want to sign soon, though talks could drag or collapse.
BACKGROUND- MGX, the AI investor set up by Mubadala and G42, is a founding AIP partner alongside BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and Microsoft. The partnership’s first deal, the USD 40 bn buyout of Aligned Data Centers, closed in July with 51 campuses and more than 6.4 GW operational and planned, concentrated in the US.
Mubadala is closest to a stake in Italy’s turbine maker. State lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) wants to sell 15-35% of Genoa-based gas and steam turbine maker Ansaldo Energia to Gulf investors, and talks with Mubadala are furthest along, Reuters reports, citing two sources it says are in the know. The stake would come as part of a broader agreement to expand Ansaldo’s operations in the Gulf. CDP owns 99.6% through CDP Equity and would keep control even at the top of that range.
Qatar’s 10x-covered auction says more about supply than demand. Investors bid QAR 4 bn for QAR 400 mn of paper on Tuesday, tapping two lines: QAR 250 mn of two-year notes at 4.90% and QAR 150 mn of five-year notes at 5.30%. Bids came in below the QAR 5 bn drawn in July, when it sold five times as much paper, and auction sizes are down from QAR 2.5 bn in February.
The premium is shrinking. The 2028 line has been tapped three times, its yield up from 4.10% in February to 4.90%, while the two-year Treasury rose faster, from 3.43% to 4.71% — compressing Qatar’s spread from c. 67bp to c. 19bp. The rising cost is imported from the Fed: the first auction since QCB matched it with a 25 bps hike on 16 September, lifting the repo rate to 4.35%. Officials have signaled one more before year-end, testing whether the spread holds under 20 bps.
A Dubai shisha maker just raised USD 425 mn in the high-yield market. Air priced senior unsecured notes USD 25 mn above the USD 400 mn it set out to raise earlier this week, Zawya reports. The five-year paper, non-call for two, carries a 7.875% coupon — inside initial thoughts of 8.25-8.5% after books topped USD 850 mn including USD 20 mn of joint lead manager interest, leaving the deal roughly twice covered.
Turkey is working out how to pay back 455.8k trapped investors. Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek is chairing two days of talks that began yesterday on liquidating the 131 funds and repaying investors, Bloomberg reports. One option is pooling the frozen assets to manage repayments, though the plan is early and nobody has settled who would run it.
It is bigger and slower than first thought. Some 455.8k individual investors hold stakes worth c. USD 18 bn, well above the 350k-plus expected earlier, the Capital Markets Board (SPK) said on Wednesday. It has also doubled the liquidating banks’ deadline to six months, citing portfolio structures and market conditions.
The criminal case is widening. Tera Holding Chairman Emre Tezmen was arrested early Wednesday with Pusula Finans Holding Chairman Serdar Turhan and three Tera executives, and prosecutors have opened proceedings against 63 people. The central bank contained the initial run last week.
Abu Dhabi’s Mair Group is buying into Turkish coffee. Mair Group has signed a share purchase agreement for 70% of Eslab, owner of specialty chain Espressolab, according to a company statement (pdf) and a disclosure (pdf) to the ADX. Terms weren’t disclosed. Eslab’s founders and existing shareholders keep the remaining 30% and stay on to support the business, and the deal still needs regulatory approvals.
The EBRD is buying into Egyptian desalination. The bank has approved an equity investment of up to USD 32.1 mn for a minority stake in RWD Investments, the Netherlands-based vehicle that runs 79 desalination plants along Egypt’s coast through subsidiaries of Hassan Allam Utilities, according to a project disclosure.
How it splits: A committed chunk for new B2B plants and upgrades, and an uncommitted tranche tied to three large PPP water projects still in the pipeline. Total project cost is put at USD 92.9 mn, and the disclosure doesn’t name the PPPs.
A USD 110 mn African Development Bank (AfDB) loan will clean up Tunisia’s state chemical plants, which President Kais Saied says cannot operate until they are fixed. AfDB wrote the check for the state-owned Tunisian Chemical Group (GCT), Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP) reports, which the Economy Ministry said will be spent to cut air pollution and rehabilitate GCT plants at Gabès, Skhira, and M'Dhilla. Just last month, Saied said only repaired and upgraded units would be allowed to operate at Gabès as thousands of residents demanded to dismantle the site.
Tunis also guaranteed a EUR 111.5 mn AfDB loan to water utility SONEDE. It will renew c. 150 km of pipe serving nearly 2.7 mn people in Greater Tunis, where SONEDE logged about 1k outages a day in mid-July. The state wants Gabès’ output more than quadrupled by 2030, so the upgrade has to work before the expansion does.
Another cloud rolls in
Alibaba will expand its data center footprint in the UAE as part of a push into Europe and the Middle East, Alibaba Cloud CTO Li Feifei was quoted as saying by Bloomberg at the company’s Apsara conference in Hangzhou. The UAE is on the expansion list alongside Malaysia, Germany, France, and Hong Kong. The e-commerce giant will open its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland, and the Netherlands over the next 12 months. No figures or timeline were given for the UAE expansion.
The bigger picture: The expansion feeds Alibaba’s plan to build a 20 GW global data center network by 2032, which Citi estimates could generate more than USD 160 bn in external cloud revenue. It also puts Alibaba in more direct competition with Amazon and Alphabet outside Asia, just as Washington pushes other countries to favor US technology over Chinese alternatives.
Made in the zone
A new integrated manufacturing and service hub is coming to Qatar’s freezones, initially focused on the machining, maintenance, and servicing of Honeywell Sundyne pumps for the energy and process sectors. Qatar Free Zones Authority and Honeywell Technologies signed an MoU to establish the facility, which will serve both local and regional MENA markets.
SOUND SMART- Sundynes are high-speed, integrally geared centrifugal pumps engineered to deliver high pressure at lower fluid flow rates across demanding oil, gas, and chemical processing operations.
Tunisia is on track to incur economic losses equivalent to 6.4% of GDP by 2050 if water scarcity goes unaddressed, according to the World Bank’s latest Tunisia Economic Monitor. At least 30% of agricultural jobs could be eliminated due to water and climate stress, impacting agricultural output, agro-processing and extending to other water-dependent sectors, the report says.
Tunisia’s renewable freshwater annual output of 380 cbm per capita is well below the international threshold for absolute water scarcity, the report says. Rising pressure on limited resources due to climate change and higher demand is further expected. This summer has already been challenging for Tunisians as they faced power and water shortages because of unprecedented heat and structural deficiencies within the public sector, as we previously reported. Worn down public utilities already cause physical water losses to reach 50% in Tunisia and Algeria, Kumulus Water co-founder and CEO Iheb Triki told us.
How to turn back the clock: The World Bank recommends that the Tunisia government focuses on long-term planning in addition to mitigation risks, citing Plan Eau 2050, which envisions about USD 900 in infrastructure investments per year and measures to strengthen water governance including reforming the legal framework surrounding water production and usage.
A seat at the table
Libya wants to take over Africa’s rotating seat at the UN Security Council for the 2028-29 term, Chairman of the Presidential Council Mohamed Al Menfi said during UN General Assembly meetings in New York. The bid would put Tripoli in position to succeed Somalia, one of the two African states currently holding a non-permanent seat, once that seat is up for renewal.
Libya’s policy pitch: Al Menfi condemned violence across the MENA and the Sahel, expressed support for Saudi Arabia following recent attacks, and pressed the case for reconstruction investment. “We want States to compete in Libya on investment, reconstruction, energy, technology and development — not for influence within its institutions,” he said. He also called for Mediterranean basin cooperation to move beyond crisis and migration management toward development, trade, investment, and energy transition.
Checking in
The GCC and North Africa have USD 90 bn worth of hotels and resorts in the pipeline, with 200k new rooms set to expand existing regional supply by 27%, according to global hospitality consultancy HVS data. More than 55% of the planned hotels in the region are expected to be delivered between now and 2030, and around 44% of rooms are currently under construction with the remainder expected to be completed through 2030 and beyond.
Saudi Arabia leads the investment drive with more than half the share of planned rooms (about 110k rooms) under construction across Riyadh, Makkah, Madinah, Diriyah, NEOM, the Red Sea and AMAALA. Egypt ranks second with around 42k rooms across Cairo, the North Coast, the Red Sea and emerging mixed-use destinations. The UAE follows with new destination-led projects particularly in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah.
Thinking small
Turkey is laying the groundwork for US-designed small modular reactors in its power grid. Turkey’s state-owned Nuclear Energy Company (TÜNAŞ) and the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) have signed a USD 2 mn agreement that will let TÜNAŞ assess US-designed reactor technologies, according to a USTDA statement. The agreement also entails building the technical, regulatory, and financial roadmaps needed to integrate small modular reactors and fourth-generation reactors into the grid for private-sector deployment.
The agreement builds on theStrategic Civil Nuclear Cooperation MoUthe two governments signed in September 2025 — a diplomatic framework the US State Department uses to expand civil nuclear relationships, improve technical capacity, and foster long-term commercial ties.
Data point
USD 10.8 bn — that’s the value of Iraq’strade surplusin 1Q 2026, driven almost entirely by crude oil exports. Crude exports recorded USD 18.6 bn, while imports recorded USD 8.7 bn (excluding freight and ins.). The current account remained in surplus at about USD 8 bn during the quarter.
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