1978 and 1979, the Yemen Arab Republic would not break with the Soviets and later renewed its Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR in October 1984. Libya Although Libya was not as firm a Soviet ally as many Third World Marxist regimes were, Moscow developed close ties with the anti-Western regime of Muammar Gaddafi, who had overthrown Libya's pro-Western monarchy in 1969. The number-two Soviet leader at that time, Alexei Kosygin, went to Libya in 1975, and Gaddafi visited Moscow in 1976, 1981 and 1985. Soviet-Libyan trade volume during the 1970s and 1980s was approximately $100 million per year and relations between the two accelerated between the years 1981 and 1982. During this period, Moscow also supplied $4.6 billion in weaponry to Libya, providing about 90 percent of that country's arms inventory, and the Gaddafi regime assisted the Soviet Union by playing a key role in preserving the Communist regimes in both Angola and Ethiopia. According to Kommersant, "Libya was one of the Soviet Union's few partners that paid in full for the military equipment it purchased from the USSR," though the Gaddafi regime still maintained good relations with the Western nations of France and Italy and refused to sign a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. Libya, however, did run up a debt to Moscow during those years. Throughout much of the Cold War, Syria and Iraq were each ruled by rival fractions of the pan-Arab Baath Party and the two nations were often tense towards one another despite their close relations with the Soviet Union. Their relationship, which had been lukewarm at best since 1963, started to change in a dramatic fashion when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown in February 1979 and replaced with the pro-Islamist regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. After seizing power, Khomeini established a system of laws which required the mostly Shiite population of Iran to follow strict adherence to the Twelver school of thought. Assad, himself a Shiite, soon formed a strong alliance with Iran and sought to use this new relationship to greatly weaken Iraq. On July 16, 1979, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who had ruled Iraq following a coup in 1968, stepped down from power and appointed his cousin Saddam Hussein, a strongly anti-Shiite Sunni, to be his successor and the Syrian government officially closed its embassy in Baghdad soon afterwards. In 1980, relations