ROME – The Trump administration may achieve an end to the ‘new cold war’ that has divided the world for the past 20 years with Italy playing a major role in consolidating an outbreak of peace in Syria, Lebanon and his homeland, the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy, H.E.  Saywan Sabir Mustafa Barzani says.

 “Under the first Trump administration we had four years of peace, he didn’t start any wars, maybe because he is a businessman, a smart guy,” Ambassador Barzani said.

 “Now there is a lot of optimism in the Middle East after what happened in Gaza. After Oct. 7 many Western and other countries woke up, because it is too dangerous,” Ambassador Barzani told the Italian Insider in an interview at his office in the Embassy on the Via Camillucia.

 “I think they changed the rules,” he added, “they don’t want any more to play that way in the Middle East. That is why Syria and Lebanon and many other areas will be more stable and less people will die. That is because what happened on Oct. 7 was something very well studied by somebody. What happened in Gaza, the bombardment, was terrible.”

 Mr Barzani has spent more time in Rome as an ambassador than any other envoy currently serving in the Eternal City, currently being on his second term in the post, a rare honour that he modestly attributes to a shortage of ambassadors in the Iraqi diplomatic service elected by parliament, as well as having served a third stint here as a diplomat beforehand. “Next time I can only return as ambassador to the Vatican,” he quipped.

 In addition to representing Iraq to its close ally Italy, Mr Barzani also is ambassador to the UN agencies in Rome and during his previous posting created the impressive Iraq Room inside the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters that director generals often use. He also donated to the World Food Programme a fine statue of a Mesopotamian lion that graces the entrance to the UN agency.

 In ancient Roman times the fierce Mesopotamian lions were shipped to the port of Ostia and released in the Colosseum where they devoured early Christians condemned to death by the Roman emperor. “The WFP executive director at the time asked me what was the relevance of the lion statue. I told her ‘zero hunger,’” he joked.

 The FAO’s sister agency the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a development bank for helping small farmers, also is of particular interest to Bahgdad’s erudite man on the Tiber.

 “It was created by Iraq and OPEC when we were rich,” he explains, and he also follows events at organisations in the Eternal City as diverse as ICROM, the cultural property agency, and the NATO Staff college.

 The ambassador also is involved with UNIDO, the industrial development agency, which at a recent conference in Rome did what he termed “a wonderful job,” arranging cooperation between the Italian employers’ federation Confindustria and the Iraqi Chamber of Commerce.

 Relations between Rome and Baghdad,  consolidated by a visit in 2022 by the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, to the Iraqi capital, have grown closer since Italy through the ENI concern and the Iraqi Petroleum has increased its energy imports from Iraq to some 13 percent of the total as part of Italian efforts to reduce dependence on Russian gas. Italy retains some 1000 troops in Iraq as part of the anti-Daesh coalition that defeated ISIS terrorists. It is Italy’s second largest peacekeeping deployment in the region after its ongoing military mission in Lebanon.

 Iraq for its part imports a constellation of Italian goods from parquet floors to furniture, Stellantis cars and IVECO heavy goods vehicles, tractors, mineral water, medicines and even olive trees from Catania. “For the moment no weapons,” the ambassador adds.

Iraq and Italy last year signed a dlrs 700 million agreement to finance industrial projects. Cultural relations between the two countries also are of vital importance with Italy involved in as many as 20 archaeological sites in Iraq.

 “Iraqi businessmen love Italy,” the ambassador says- “Whenever we make a new company the priority is given always to importing from Italy.”

 Italian engineers and architects have designed the huge port project being constructed and partly operational already at the Faw Peninsula near Basra. The Grand Faw Port is meant to be the southern terminal of the Iraq Development Road, and is considered a strategic national project for Iraq. It is planned to become one of the largest ports in the world and the largest in the Middle East.

 Italy’s TECHNITAL concern played a key role in construction of the breakwater at the port complex, which will be linked to countries as far away as Georgia and Armenia through the 1200 km Iraqi road project together with Qatar, the UAE and Turkey in developing railways and highways, a latter day version of the 19^th century Berlin to Baghdad railway.

 Mr Barzani sees the new rail connections as turning the page on the kind of state terrorism that he considers was started by Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War when he taught Arab forces to attack Turkish trains. “When the trains run it means there are no secret services.”These dirty wars should stop. The best thing would be to have no borders, no dictatorships and no rules ao that everyone can have access to energy and live in peace.”

 The Ambassador sees the Middle East entering a new era with such projects giving Iraq enhanced geopolitical importance as Washington spearheads turning the page on the ‘New Cold War’ that was under way since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that led to the demise of Saddam Hussein, freeing Iraqi Kurds such as Mr Barzani from the tyranny of the Baathist regime.

 “The worst thing then was the silence about genocide” of the Kurds by the Baathist regime, he says. “The whole world was supporting Saddam. They destroyed 90 percent of Kurdistan.” Even when Saddam was captured he was not tried for the genocide of Halajba where 70,000 Kurdish civilians were murdered in a chemical weapons attack. The West was keen to avoid publicising its complicity, for instance in the supply of French warplanes used to deploy chemical weapons.

 In his vision of the future, by contrast, the ambassador would like to see diplomacy giving priority once again to destruction of weapons stockpiles and an end to skullduggery and terrorism fostered by deviated intelligence services who have used Iraq, the site of Noah’s Ark and the birthplace of Abraham, as a proxy battlefield for the past 5000 years.

 “As diplomats we should find ways to destroy weapons,” His Excellency Barzani says, adding that he would like to see “an international convention to ban the use of secret services.”

 “The human life is the most sacred thing in the world.”

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