Iraq yesterday announced it was restoring full diplomatic relations with Syria after a 26-year break and hailed a pledge from its western neighbor to do more to cooperate on security.
"We have signed a little while ago an agreement to restore complete diplomatic relations with Syria," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told a joint news conference with his visiting Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem.
"[The] Iraqi flag will be raised in Syria and the Syrian flag will be hoisted in Baghdad," Zebari said.
The Iraqi minister said agreement had also been reached on closer security cooperation following repeated US accusations that Syria was turning a blind eye to Sunni Arab insurgents smuggling men and materiel across the border.
"There was an agreement to have meetings between security officials from both countries and we also discussed developing commercial relations," he said.
The Syrian minister acknowledged that his talks in Baghdad had been "frank after they [relations] were disturbed all these years."
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime cut ties with Syria in 1980 in protest at its support for Iran after an eight-year war between the two neighbors broke out that year.
Muallem said he hoped the restoration of normal relations would put an end to US criticism of Syria over its role in Iraq.
"I do not want to go back to the former accusations. We seek future cooperation in all fields," he said.
Although Iraqi officials have visited Damascus, Muallem, who arrived on Sunday, was the first Syrian official to visit Baghdad since the US-led invasion of 2003.
The rapprochement between the two neighbors comes amid mounting calls for the US administration to engage Syria and its regional ally Iran in efforts to stabilize Iraq three and a half years after the invasion.
Coalition forces yesterday raided Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite stronghold on Tuesday, killing three people, including a young boy, police said. Holding the body of the child in his arms, a Shiite legislator condemned Iraq's government for allowing such attacks.
"I am suspending my membership in Parliament since it remains silent about crimes such as this against the Iraqi people," legislator Saleh al-Ukailli told reporters. "I will not return to parliament until the occupation troops leave the country."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema