President Gloria Arroyo said Saturday she hopes to win job contracts in Iraq for the Philippines' huge work force following the arrest of Baghdad's deposed leader Saddam Hussein.
Her government had backed the US-led invasion of Iraq last year and Filipino troops and medical workers have been sent to southern Iraq as part of the occupation forces.
"Now that Saddam Hussein has been arrested the Iraqi economy should be up and running in a short while and allies like the Philippines would benefit from new job opportunities that this would produce," she said in a radio address.
The US defence department announced last month it would expressly exclude countries that opposed the US-led war and invasion of Iraq from winning US-funded reconstruction contracts.
More than seven million Filipinos live or work abroad, many of them in the Middle East.
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