Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will go to neighbouring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what shall be his first journey overseas since he took workplace in July.
Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to fulfill senior Iraqi officers.
The go to comes on the invitation of Iraq’s premier, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the official IRNA information company quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.
The 2 international locations will signal memoranda of understanding on cooperation and safety, Sadegh stated, with out elaborating.
He stated the agreements have been to have been signed throughout a deliberate go to to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.
However Raisi was killed in Might together with the then international minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.
Since taking workplace, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritise” strengthening ties with the Islamic republic’s neighbours.
Relations between Iran and Iraq, each Shiite-majority international locations, have grown nearer over the previous twenty years.
Tehran is one in every of Iraq’s main commerce companions, and wields appreciable political affect in Baghdad the place its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the present authorities.
In March 2023 the 2 international locations signed a safety settlement overlaying their frequent border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition teams in Iraq’s north.
They’ve since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish insurgent teams and take away them from border areas.
Tehran accuses the teams of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 protests that erupted after the dying in custody of Iranian-Kurd girl Mahsa Amini.
In January, Iran launched a lethal strike in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan area, saying it had focused a website utilized by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad)”.
On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group stated one in every of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq’s northern metropolis of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian intelligence”.
Native Asayesh safety forces stated Khosrawi was arrested “as a result of he didn’t have residency” within the Kurdish area, and denied he had any connection to “political activism”.
