Kuwaiti foreign minister to visit Iraq

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kuwaiti Minister of Foreign Affairs Minister Sheikh Salem al-Sabah is set to visit Iraq by the end of July, the Gulf country’s envoy in Baghdad announced in a meeting with President Abdul Latif Rashid on Sunday.

Kuwaiti Ambassador Tariq Abdullah al-Faraj met with President Rashid at Baghdad Palace in the Iraqi capital, where they spoke about the bilateral relations between the two neighboring countries as the ties have thawed in recent years following decades of conflict and tension.

Minister Sheikh Salem al-Sabah will visit Baghdad by the end of this month, the envoy told Rashid, according to a statement from the presidency office.

The visit comes as Baghdad and Kuwait City have normalized relations and increased cooperation across many sectors in recent years. 

In June 2019, the late Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah visited Iraq for the first time following two decades of diplomatic freeze. Iraq hosted Kuwaiti officials in its annual Baghdad Conference for Cooperation and Partnership twice.

Iraq paid all the $352 billion worth of war reparations it had owed to Kuwait as the result of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the oil-rich kingdom in 1990.

Claiming Kuwait was stealing Iraq's oil through horizontal drilling, Saddam launched a massive military campaign on Aug. 3, 1990, to invade the small Gulf state, which was swiftly defeated as the neighboring forces outnumbered it.

After the invasion, Saddam declared that Kuwait was Iraq's "19th Province."

The Iraqi forces came under massive air bombardment from the International Coalition, significantly weakening the army, which had just come out of an eight-year-long war with another neighbor, Iran.

Sanctions began to be imposed on Iraq by the international community as a punishment for the invasion until 2003 when Saddam and his regime were deposed.