Iran

Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighboring 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 "prioritize" strengthening ties with the Islamic republic's neighbors.

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)," an apparent reference to Israel.

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."

A Paris court in May detained and charged a couple on accusations that they were involved in Iranian plots to kill Jews in Germany and France, police sources told Agence France-Presse.

Authorities charged Abdelkrim S., 34, and his partner Sabrina B., 33, on May 4 with conspiring with a criminal terrorist organization and placed them in pretrial detention.

The case, known as "Marco Polo" and revealed Thursday by French news website Mediapart, signals a revival in Iranian state-sponsored terrorism in Europe, according to a report by France's General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) seen by AFP.

"Since 2015, the Iranian (secret) services have resumed a targeted killing policy," the French security agency wrote, adding that "the threat has worsened again in the context of the Israel-Hamas war."

The alleged objective for Iranian intelligence was to target civilians and sow fear in Europe among the country's political opposition as well as among Jews and Israelis.

Iran is accused of recruiting criminals, including drug lords, to conduct such operations.

Abdelkrim S. was previously sentenced to 10 years in prison in a killing in Marseille and released on probation in July 2023.

He is accused of being the main France-based operative for an Iran-sponsored terrorist cell that planned acts of violence in France and Germany.

A former fellow inmate is believed to have connected the suspect with the cell's coordinator, a major drug trafficker from the Lyon area who likely visited Iran in May, according to the DGSI.

The group intended to attack a Paris-based former employee at an Israeli security firm and three of his colleagues residing in the Paris suburbs.

Three Israeli-German citizens in Munich and Berlin were also among the targets.

Investigators believe that Abdelkrim S., despite his probation, made multiple trips to Germany for scouting purposes, including travels to Berlin with his wife.

He denied the accusations and said he simply had purchases to make.

French authorities are also crediting the cell with plots to set fire to four Israeli-owned companies in the south of France between late December 2023 and early January 2024, said a police source.

Abdelkrim S. rejected the claims, saying he had acted as a go-between on Telegram for the mastermind and other individuals involved in a planned insurance scam, the source added.