The new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, has indicated he will soon visit Iraq. It would be his first foreign trip, indicating the trajectory of his policies and the importance he places on Iran’s foreign relations. Iran has close ties to Iraq. In addition, Iran backs a number of militias in Iraq that have carried out attacks on Israel over the last 10 months. The militias have also attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria more than 100 times in the past year. Kataib Hezbollah, one of the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, murdered three US soldiers in Jordan in a January drone attack.
According to an interview with IRNA, Iran’s state media, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Mohammad Kazem Al Sadeq, said Pezeshkian will travel to Baghdad to meet with his Iraqi counterparts. The trip is expected to take place between September 10 and September 21. “A number of memoranda of understanding (MoUs) that were supposed to be signed by the heads of the two countries during a visit of the late President Ebrahim Raisi will be signed during the upcoming visit,” the ambassador noted, according to the Iranian state media report. “He added that some of the MoUs also need to be referred to the new Iranian administration’s ministers, which the ministers of the two nations will subsequently sign at an appropriate time.”
Iraq and Iran have had close ties since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iran had backed attacks on US forces, and when the US left in 2011, Iran benefited greatly from the emergence of the new Iraq. Between 2011 and 2014, when ISIS took over parts of Iraq, Iraq became a relatively chaotic country. Iran used the ISIS invasion to increase its role in Iraq, supporting the Iraqi government in the war on ISIS. After that war ended, Iran worked closely with Baghdad to erode the gains of the Kurdistan Regional Government. For instance, Iran condemned the Kurdistan independence referendum and engineered the invasion of Kirkuk by Iraqi federal forces in 2017. Since then, Iran has worked to divide the Kurdistan region and continued to infiltrate Iraq with militias. Additionally, Iran has made Iraq dependent on its energy resources. Iraq even requires energy support from Iran, despite the fact that Iraq sits on an ocean of oil and has massive oil reserves.
Iran and Russia
At the same time that Pezeshkian is working on his Iraq visit, Iran is also focused northward to Russia and Azerbaijan. According to a separate report from Iran, the country is keenly interested in a Rasht-Astara railway corridor that would become part of the North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). According to an IRNA report, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently discussed this issue. Russia’s special presidential representative, Igor Levitin, made these claims in a recent statement. According to IRNA, “Putin focused on talks on the establishment of the railway project in the west of the corridor, which aims to transport 15 million metric tons of goods, the special aide to the Russian president said in a meeting held in Moscow on Monday with Iran’s Ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali.”
Apparently, the Russians will send an envoy to Iran to further discuss the project. “Jalali also said that in 2023, some 650,000 metric tons of commodities were transported from the eastern part of the INSTC for the first time,” the report said, noting that transportation of goods from the Caspian Sea on the corridor route increased to 10 million metric tons in 2023, while it was six million metric tons in 2022.”
“The western part of the INSTC, which passes through Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, could transport over three million metric tons of goods in 2023,” the report adds, “while the maximum amount of exchange has been 1.5 to two million metric tons in previous years, according to Jalali.”
The Iranian media claims that the North-South Transport Corridor could include Iran, India, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkey, and could even stretch further to enable transport to Syria and as far south as Oman. It also envisions the corridor connecting to Bulgaria and Ukraine. It may be far-fetched, but regional countries are keenly interested in this economic initiative.
Putin has also discussed opening a transport corridor connecting the western regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan with the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, according to a separate report in the media in Azerbaijan.