TEHRAN, Sept 8, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian will 
visit neighbouring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what 
will be his first trip abroad since he took office in July.

Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet 
senior Iraqi officials.

The visit comes at the invitation of Iraq's premier, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, 
the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran's ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad 
Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.

The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and 
security, Sadegh said, without elaborating.

He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to 
Iraq by Iran's late president, Ebrahim Raisi.

But Raisi was killed in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein 
Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded 
mountainside in northern Iran.

Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to "prioritise" strengthening ties 
with the Islamic republic's neighbours.

Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown 
closer over the past two decades.

Tehran is one of Iraq's leading trade partners, and wields considerable 
political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and 
the current government.

In March 2023 the two countries signed a security agreement covering their 
common border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq's 
north.

They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them 
from border areas.

Tehran accuses the groups of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 
protests that erupted after the death in custody of Iranian-Kurd woman Mahsa 
Amini.

In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq's autonomous 
Kurdistan region, saying it had targeted a site used by "spies of the Zionist 
regime (Mossad)".

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