IRAQ Iranian President Pezeshkian to visit Baghdad on first official trip abroad

The visit will begin on September 11. He will be accompanied by a high-level delegation and will also stop in Erbil. A memorandum of understanding on cooperation and security is expected to be signed. The mission had been planned for some time and had been postponed due to the death of his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, when his helicopter crashed.

Tehran () – Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has chosen Iraq as the destination for his first official trip abroad, just over two months after the elections that confirmed the victory of the candidate of the “reformist” faction. On September 11, he will be in Baghdad (then Erbil in the north), where he will meet with the country’s top officials to discuss economics and diplomacy (regionally and with other countries) at a time of deep tensions in the Middle East as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Added to this is the so-called “northern front”, where the Jewish state is facing Hezbollah, a pro-Tehran Shiite movement, and attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebel militias on ships transiting the Red Sea, with serious repercussions for international trade.

Responding to an invitation from his Iraqi counterpart, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, President Pezeshkian will lead a high-level delegation to carry out a visit already planned by his predecessor Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdolahian. On the sidelines of the summit, the two delegations – following the dictates of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on international agreements and Tehran’s foreign policy – will sign a memorandum of understanding on cooperation and security.

Since taking office, Pezeshkian has promised to “prioritize” strengthening ties with the Islamic Republic’s neighbors. Fighting a bloody war in the 1980s, followed by a period of deep tensions, relations between Iran and Iraq, two Shiite-majority countries, have been consolidating over the past two decades. Tehran is one of Baghdad’s main trading partners and wields considerable political influence, not only in the capital but also in other parts of the country, including the Shiite-majority south and the northern front, through proxy groups and armed militias. Even in the current parliament and government, there is a presence of members and parties that refer more or less directly to the Islamic Republic.

In March 2023, the two countries signed a security agreement covering their shared border, months after Tehran repeatedly and with increasing intensity attacked Kurdish opposition groups in northern Iraq. The governments of the two countries have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and expel them from border areas. Tehran accuses the warring factions and opposition movements in exile of importing weapons and fomenting the 2022 protests, which erupted after the death in custody of the young Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police for not wearing the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, correctly.

In January, Tehran launched a deadly attack in the autonomous Kurdistan region, claiming that it was targeting a site used by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad),” a not-so-veiled reference to Israel. On September 7, an Iranian Kurdish group in exile said that one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian secret services.” Local security forces Asayesh said that Khosrawi was arrested “because he had no residence” in the Kurdish region, and denied any links to “political activism.”