Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, arrived in Iraq on Wednesday for his first trip abroad since taking office in July, a demonstration of the value the Iranians place on the strategic alliance with their neighbor as tensions rise in the region around them.
Mr. Pezeshkian’s three-day trip will include visits to several cities that represent Iran’s political, religious, economic and security interests in Iraq. He was traveling with a delegation of senior officials and businessmen, according to Iranian media.
“I imagine this will be a very good trip for making economic, cultural, political and security ties,” Mr. Pezeshkian said, according to televised remarks on state media. “And I hope we can forge closer and brotherly ties to all Islamic countries starting from Iraq.”
In Baghdad, Mr. Pezeshkian is scheduled to meet with the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani; its president, Abdul Latif Rashid; and other senior officials.
The trip comes as Iraq moves closer to taking a number of steps that align with Iran’s long-term objectives, including moving forward on negotiations for the departure of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Iran and the United States have regarded each other as enemies since the 1979 hostage crisis and have not had diplomatic relations since then. Iran has been leery of the presence of those U.S. troops, which they see as a potential danger.
But the drawdown will likely be spread over two years — far slower than Iran had wanted. And a number of questions remain unanswered, including whether U.S. troops in Syria would leave at the same time.
There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and about 900 in Syria, many of them Special Operations forces. The primary focus of both groups is helping to fight the Islamic State, the militant group that, especially in the last year or so, has begun to rebuild and to launch regular attacks in Syria.
A few hours before Mr. Pezeshkian’s plane touched down, a rocket attack on U.S. troops based at Baghdad Airport served as a reminder of the volatility in the region. Iraq’s joint command said it was investigating the attack’s origins, but there have been repeated attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by armed groups with links to Iran.
On Thursday, Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to travel to Karbala and Najaf, two cities that are especially holy to Shia Muslims and are popular destinations for Iranian pilgrims — several million of whom visit annually, greatly lifting Iraq’s tourism income.
Then he will go to the southern city of Basra, an important trade hub because of its proximity to Iran’s southern borders. Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to travel to the northern Kurdistan region and visit the cities of Sulaymaniyah and Erbil on Friday.
The visit comes as tensions have flared anew between Iran and Israel. After the assassination in July of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran, there have been fears of a widening war if Iran retaliates.
Iraq has served as an economic and political gateway of sorts for Iran to the Arab world, and analysts say the decision to choose it as the destination of his first official trip falls in line with Mr. Pezeshkian’s two main policy goals: strengthening the Iranian economy and forging closer ties with regional Arab countries.
“The government considers relations with Iraq extremely important,” Hamid Hosseini, a member of the board of directors of the Iran and Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Our security is linked to one another. We share cultural ties. And economically, Iran needs to grow its presence in Iraq’s growing and emerging market.”
Iraq ranks, after China, as Iran’s second-largest trade partner. And while China mainly buys Iran’s crude oil and petrochemical products, the Iraqi market is more varied. Imports include Iranian-made household goods, construction material and other products, said Mr. Hosseini, who added that trade between Iran and Iraq had nearly doubled since 2023.
But the banking sanctions imposed by the United States, Mr. Hosseini said, have made it difficult for Iran to gain access to all the money this trade earns. Mr. Pezeshkian is expected to try to negotiate the release of some $10 billion in Iranian assets held up in Iraq.
Since the fall of Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, in 2003 after the U.S.-led military invasion, Iran has invested heavily in expanding its influence in Iraq. One upshot of these efforts is Iran’s using Baghdad as a mediator to try to help restore broken ties with Saudi Arabia. It has also connected Iran, by land and air, to its allies like Lebanon and Syria. And Iraq can also help Iran forge closer ties with Jordan and Egypt, analysts say.
Iran’s new foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in an interview on Monday with an Iraqi television channel, Al Forat, that the president’s trip showed “the depth of our relations” with Iraq. The two countries, he said, are “on the right path for controlling our border security and violent groups.”
Last week, Baghdad’s central government forcibly relocated Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, including an armed separatist militant group called Komala, from near Iran’s borders. Komala said in a statement that it had been evicted from its headquarters and moved about 40 miles north to the Dukan region in northern Iraq.
The relocation came after years of Iranian pressure and a security agreement between the two countries.
And on Tuesday, Iraq extradited to Iran a Kurdish political activist, Behzad Khosravi, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, according to the party and Iranian media reports. His arrest and extradition raised alarm among Iranian political activists that Iraqi Kurdistan may no longer be a safe refuge.
Iraqi Kurdistan has two rival parties, which have strongholds in Sulaymaniyah and Erbil. Iran has traditionally had close ties with the party based in Sulaymaniyah, but relations with Erbil have been tense because of a large American military base there. Iran has attacked the Kurdistan region of Iraq with missiles targeting bases of Kurdish opposition groups and buildings it said Israel was using as secret bases. Iraq and Kurdish officials denied the latter.
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