Iranian President Pezeshkian makes first official visit abroad to Iraq

Travelling with a high-level delegation, the Iranian leader will be in Baghdad next Wednesday, followed by Erbil. A memorandum of understanding on cooperation and security will be signed. Planned for some time, the visit was postponed following the death in a helicopter crash of Pezeshkian’s predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi.

Tehran (AsiaNews) – Iran's new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has chosen Iraq for his first official trip abroad, just over two months after the election that sanctioned the victory of the candidate of the "reformist" faction.

On Wednesday, Mr Pezeshkian will be in Baghdad (then in Erbil, northern Iraq) where he will meet Iraqi leaders to discuss economic and diplomatic issues (regional, etc.).

This comes amid intense tensions in the Middle East linked to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, its "northern front" against pro-Iranian Hezbollah, and attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militia on Red Sea shipping, with serious repercussions for international trade.

Accepting the invitation of his Iraqi counterpart,  Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, President Pezeshkian will lead a high-level delegation for a visit that had been planned for his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

The two parties are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding on cooperation and security, agreed to by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on international affairs and foreign policy.

Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to "prioritise" strengthening ties with Iran’s neighbours.

Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shia-majority countries, have developed over the past two decades, following periods of intense tensions and a bloody war in the 1980s.

Iran is one of Iraq’s main trading partners and exerts considerable political influence not only in the capital, but also in other areas of the country, including the Shia-majority south, not to mention southern Lebanon, through political and armed groups.

Even in Iraq’s current parliament and government, some politicians and parties are virtual proxies of the Islamic Republic.

In March 2023, the two countries signed a security agreement covering their common border, months after Tehran attacked several times Kurdish opposition groups in northern Iraq. Since then, they agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them from border areas.

Tehran accuses exiled opposition groups of importing weapons and fomenting the 2022 protests, which erupted after the death Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody following her arrest for not wearing a hijab correctly.

In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, targeting a site used by "spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad)," an apparent reference to Israel.

On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group said one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq's northern city of Sulaymaniyah 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”.

• iraq
• iran
• state visit
• masoud pezeshkian
• mohammed shia al-sudani
• ebrahim raisi
• ali khamenei
• mahsa amini
• kurdistan
• security
• trade