Iranian President to visit Baghdad soon

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will visit Baghdad soon in what will be the first-ever visit of an Iranian president to Iraq, a state television channel said on its website today.

The invitation for Ahmadinejad came during a recent visit here by the Iraqi prime minister, Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki was quoted as saying on the website of English PressTV channel.

The date of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Baghdad has not been fixed yet but would be soon announced, Mottaki said.

Nouri Maliki, a Shiite whose Shiite-led government has strong ties to Iran, officially invited Ahmadinejad while in Tehran earlier in August.

The three-day visit was seen as a boost of Iranian support for Maliki, stuck in political turmoil at home.

Maliki’s government has only partially backed the US claims that Tehran is behind attacks on US troops, saying it has not ruled out an Iranian role in fuelling the anti-American insurgency. Tehran denies the charges.

The two neighbours share a 800 mile long boundary and have standing disputes over border issues, including the demarcation line in the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which is called Arvand River by Iranians.

The two lost more than one million lives in the eight-year-long war launched by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1980. No peace accord has been signed.

Iraq was formed in 1921 and became independent in 1932. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it became a republic and has since had a president.

Previous top Iranians to visit Iraq were Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution who lived in exile in the Iraqi city of Najaf for 14 years before the revolution, and Iran’s late King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who briefly stopped in Baghdad on a flight to Italy in 1953.