(Tehran) Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian is due to travel to neighbouring Iraq on Wednesday, making his first foreign trip since his election in July, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.
“Bilateral meetings with Iraqi officials and the signing of memoranda of understanding and security memoranda are on the agenda of this visit,” the agency said.
This is the first official visit by Mr Pezeshkian, a reformer elected in July who has said he wants to give “priority” to strengthening relations with neighbouring countries.
In late August, Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh, announced that President Pezeshkian would visit Iraq at the invitation of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Chia al-Soudani.
“Memoranda that were to be signed by the leaders of the two countries on the occasion of a visit by the late president, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi (who died in May), will be signed” during this trip, the diplomat added.
Relations between the two Shiite-majority neighbors have strengthened over the past two decades. Tehran, one of Iraq’s main trading partners, wields considerable political influence in Baghdad. Its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and have chosen the current government.
The two countries signed a security agreement in March 2023, months after Tehran launched strikes against Kurdish opposition groups in northern Iraq. They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and move them away from the shared border.
Tehran accuses them of importing weapons into Iran from Iraq and of fueling protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, in September 2022.
In January, Iranian forces carried out an attack in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, saying they had targeted “a headquarters” of “spies of the Zionist regime.” [Mossad] “, referring to Israel, Iran’s sworn enemy.
On Saturday, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI), a long-established opposition group to the Islamic Republic in the region, announced the extradition of one of its members to Iran, specifying that Behzad Khosrawi had been arrested and handed over “to Iranian intelligence.”
For their part, the Assayesh, the security services of Suleimaniyeh, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan where the local authorities traditionally maintain good relations with Tehran, indicated that they had arrested this Iranian citizen “because he did not have a residence” in order in this autonomous region of northern Iraq.