By Syed Zafar Mehdi
TEHRAN, Iran (AA) – Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit Egypt on Thursday to attend the D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation summit, marking the first visit by an Iranian leader since 2013.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said that Pezeshkian will be accompanied by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi during the trip.
The visit will mark the first time in over a decade that an Iranian president travels to Egypt, as relations between the two countries have long been strained.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the last Iranian president to visit Egypt in February 2013 to attend a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
The D-8 member countries include Iran, Türkiye, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Nigeria, which came together in 1997 through the Istanbul Declaration of the Summit of Heads of State.
Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called the D-8 meeting an “important summit,” saying Araghchi would take part in the ministerial conference, followed by the summit, in which Pezeshkian will participate.
On the sidelines of the visit, Pezeshkian and Araghchi are expected to hold bilateral talks with their counterparts from other D-8 member countries, he added.
Observers believe the visit presents an opportunity for Tehran and Cairo to formally restart efforts to revive their diplomatic ties, following years of attempts to bury the hatchet.
Araghchi traveled to Cairo in October to discuss the Israeli wars in Gaza and Lebanon with Egyptian officials, while his Egyptian counterpart, Badr Abdelatty, attended Pezeshkian’s inauguration in Tehran in July.
Relations between Tehran and Cairo had fluctuated since the 1979 revolution in Iran when Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel and signed the Camp David Accords.
Egypt’s decision to welcome deposed Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after the 1979 revolution and Tehran's move to name a street after the assassin of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat further exacerbated tensions between the two Muslim-majority countries.
Following the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023, brokered by China, Tehran and Cairo also made efforts to mend their ties.
In November 2023, Iran's former President Ebrahim Raisi met his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on the sidelines of an Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh, marking the first meeting between the leaders of the two countries in over 10 years.
In meetings on the sidelines of Thursday's summit, developments in the region, particularly the formation of a new government in Syria, are expected to be discussed.