FM, SNSC chief visiting Pakistan, Iraq for good neighborliness
Iranian Foreign Minister and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) will soon travel to Pakistan and Iraq, respectively, in response to recent tensions between Iran and its neighboring countries.
Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Sunday warned against the enemies’ attempts to use terrorism as a tool against the country’s good neighborliness policy, saying he will visit Pakistan on Monday, while Ali Akbar Ahmadian will visit Iraq soon to resolve the recent issues, IRNA reported.
“With a special focus on the good neighborliness policy, we have seen and defined security at the heart of the good neighborliness policy. We will never allow the enemies to target the friendship, peace and security of the region,” Amir-Abdollahian said at the 7th Conference on Multilateralism in the History of Iran’s Foreign Relations in Tehran.
He further said that over the past days, there have been terrorist moves in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and areas in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province.
Iran, he added, held constructive talks with Pakistani and Iraqi officials in a bid to protect the security of the country and its borders as well as that of the region.
The discussions focused on a joint understanding and political solutions to the occurrences in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iraq’s Kurdistan, Amir-Abdollahian noted.
Earlier this month, Iran and Pakistan witnessed an escalation of cross-border tensions over Iran’s counter-terrorism operations.
On January 16, Iran launched simultaneous drone and missile attacks on two bases of Jaish al-Adl, a terror outfit that was formed in 2012 and has conducted several attacks on Iranian soil in recent years.
The group claimed responsibility for an attack in December 2023 on a police station in the southeastern city of Rask that killed at least 11 Iranian police officers. On January 10, another attack by the group on a police station in the city killed one officer.
Also, characterizing it a response to Tehran’s operation against terrorist bases inside Pakistan, nine people, including four children, were killed after Islamabad admitted attacking a village in Saravan in Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan Province.
Pakistan carried out the strikes on January 18 against what it called bases of the separatist Baloch Liberation Front and Baloch Liberation Army in regions close to Iran’s border.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) also launched missile strikes on an Israeli spy base in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.