Pezeshkian to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighboring Iraq on Wednesday 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 Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Ale-Sadegh as saying.
The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and security, Ale-Sadegh said, without elaborating.
He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.
Raisi died in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern
Iran.
Resolving differences
Mohammad Mehdi Shahriari, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of Iran’s Parliament, said Pezeshkian’s trip to Iraq is aimed at improving relations with Iran’s neighbors and economic growth as well as resolving some differences with the Arab country.
He called the demarcation of the common border as the main issue that has remained unresolved between the two neighbors since the end of Iraq’s imposed war on Iran in the 1980s.
Shahriari also pointed to Iraq’s outstanding debts to Iran over import of electricity and other things, saying that the debts should be cleared by the Iraqi government.
He also said problems facing some Iranian manufacturers who export their products to Iraq can be resolved during the presidential visit.
Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritize” the fortification of ties with Iran’s neighbors.
Relations between Iran and Iraq have grown closer over the past two decades. Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners. 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 anti-Iran Kurdish groups and remove them from border areas.