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BAGHDAD: An airline in Greece will start running direct flights from the European Union country to Baghdad before the end of the year, the Greek foreign minister announced Thursday during a visit to Iraq.
Giorgos Gerapetritis said that Greek air carrier Aegean Airlines will run its first flight from Athens to Baghdad on Dec. 16. No other European airlines are currently running direct flights to the Iraqi capital.
“I think this will substantially boost our people-to-people, economic, but also cultural, ties,” Gerapetritis said at a news conference alongside his Iraqi counterpart.
Aegean Airlines and a handful of other carriers already run direct flights from Europe to Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, but carriers had largely steered clear of Baghdad because of security concerns.
After the fall of Iraq’s longtime autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein, in a US-led invasion in 2003, the ensuing security vacuum spawned years of sectarian violence and the rise of armed extremist groups, including the Daesh group.
In the years since IS lost control of the territory that it once held in Iraq and neighboring Syria, the security situation has stabilized.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein, in a statement, welcomed the launch of direct flights, and said that the two countries are discussing “cooperation in the fields of agriculture, investment, and tourism.”
He said that a series of recent visits to Iraq by European leaders “reflect the stability the country is experiencing” and “its growing standing on the international stage.”
Plans are underway to upgrade Baghdad’s international airport. Iraq recently awarded a $764 million contract to rehabilitate, expand and operate the airport to a global consortium made up of Corporacion America Airport, a Luxembourg-based airport operator, and Iraqi investment company Amwaj International.

ISTANBUL: A Turkish court sentenced 11 people to life in prison on Friday over a fire that killed 78 people at a ski resort in northwest Turkiye’s Bolu mountains in January, state media reported.
Halit Ergul, owner of the Grand Kartal Hotel where the blaze erupted, was among the 11 defendants given aggravated life sentences by the court in Bolu province, according to state-run broadcaster TRT Haber.
Thirty-four children were among those killed in the fire, which occurred during school holidays when many families from nearby Istanbul and Ankara head to the Bolu mountains to ski. Another 137 people suffered injuries.
There were a total of 32 defendants in the trial, 20 of them in pre-trial detention, TRT said. Besides Ergul, the accused included hotel board members, managers and staff, as well as a deputy mayor and fire brigade personnel.
The disaster had triggered calls for accountability and reform. Independent experts said the hotel, at the Kartalkaya ski resort, lacked basic fire safety measures.
The blaze started in the restaurant floor of the 12-story building, where 238 guests were staying. It forced panicked hotel guests to jump from windows in the middle of the night.