Reuters is reporting that Iraq’s central bank has announced this week that it is close to settling the nation’s trade with China in yuan. The report noted, the central bank is attempting to improve access to foreign currency.

According to the report, the central bank has been urgently trying to find a means of addressing a dollar shortage in the local markets. As a result, earlier this month, the cabinet approved a currency revaluation.

Mudhir Salih, the Iraqi economic adviser, said in an interview with the outlet, “It is for the first time that imports would be financed from China in yuan, as Iraqi imports from China have been financed in (US) dollars only.”

According to the regulator, one proposed possibility would be for the central bank to increase the balances of Iraqi banks which hold accounts with Chinese banks in yuan. Another possible option entails increasing the balances of local banks using the central bank’s accounts with JP Morgan and Development Bank of Singapore (DBS).

Salih explained that the first solution would be dependent on the central bank’s reserves in yuan. The second option would make use of the bank’s reserves of US dollars at JP Morgan and DBS, which would be converted to yuan and used to pay the final receiver in China.

Reuters noted this was the latest sign of the growing importance of the yuan in the global economy.

Beijing has lately been promoting settlements in currencies other than the US dollar and the euro, as it has been opening its financial markets to nations looking to diversify their currency exposures. It is part of a de-dollarization strategy the country has been pursuing, designed to make its trade resilient to any interference by the US in the event relations deteriorate further.

Meanwhile Russia has been following a similar path, due largely to Western sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine, which forced it out of Western financial systems and froze its dollar reserves in an effort to prevent it from engaging in trade. In response it developed alternative systems to replace those of the west, and began encouraging trade in local currencies to reduce the ability of the Unites States and the Western powers to engage in such economic warfare.

Together, it has all placed the dollar’s status as reserve currency under increasing threat.