Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

TEHRAN: Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighbouring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what will be his first trip abroad since he took office in July.

Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials.

The visit comes at the invitation of Iraq’s premier, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.

The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and security, Sadegh said, without elaborating.

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He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.

But Raisi was killed in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.

Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritise” strengthening ties with the Islamic republic’s neighbours.

Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown closer over the past two decades.

Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners, and wields considerable political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the current government.

In March 2023 the two countries signed a security agreement covering their common border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq’s north.

They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them from border areas.

Tehran accuses the groups of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 protests that erupted after the death in custody of Iranian-Kurd woman Mahsa Amini.

In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, saying it had targeted a site used by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad)”.

On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group said one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq’s northern city of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian intelligence”.

Local Asayesh security forces said Khosrawi was arrested “because he did not have residency” in the Kurdish region, and denied he had any connection to “political activism”.