Visiting Iraqi FM meets Iran President Rouhani

The visiting Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday, in what marked his first visit to the Iranian capital.

Hussein arrived in Tehran for his two-day visit earlier on Saturday and met Mohammad Javad Zarif, his Iranian counterpart upon arrival.

Zarif visited Baghdad in mid-July, when he met with Hussein and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.

It was Zarif's first visit to Iraq since a US airstrike in January killed a top Iranian general, Qassim Soleimani, outside Baghdad's international airport.

The strike catapulted Iraq to the brink of a US-Iran proxy war that could have destabilied the Middle East.

After Zarif's trip, the Iraqi premier visited Iran in July.

The report did not elaborate on the main reasons behind the top Iraqi diplomat's two-day trip to Tehran.

Iran sees neighboring Iraq as a possible route to bypass US sanctions that President Donald Trump re-imposed in 2018 after pulling the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.

Last year, Iran's exports to Iraq amounted to nearly $9 billion, the official IRNA news agency reported on Tuesday.

It said the two nations will discuss increasing the amount to $20 billion.

Before the current global pandemic, some 5 million Iranian pilgrims annually brought in nearly $5 billion visiting Iraq's Shiite holy sites.

Iran has seen the worst outbreak in the region, with more than 443,000 thousand confirmed cases and at least 25,300 deaths.