Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Cairo on Wednesday, marking the first time an Iranian leader has visited Egypt in three decades. Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi publicly welcomed the Iranian leader, with other Egyptian officials and parts of the Egyptian public criticized Iran. One unidentified assailant even pelted the Iranian leader with a pair of shoes.
Iran’s leader reportedly offered to provide a lifeline to the increasingly flailing Egyptian economy. “I have said previously that we can offer a big credit line to the Egyptian brothers, and many services,” Ahmadinejad told Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram daily.
Egypt revealed Tuesday that its foreign reserves had fallen ten percent in January alone to roughly $13.6 billion. The figure is below the $15-billion mark the country’s central bank had set earlier as a critical minimum. The country’s foreign reserves have dropped by well over half in the two years since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in a three-week popular revolt. Bouts of political violence have undermined foreign investment and tourism.
Analysts discounted Ahmadinejad’s. Iran’s economy has itself been badly damaged by international sanctions brought on in response to country’s suspected illicit nuclear weapons program, and Egypt would in any case be loath to accept aid from a country with which it still maintains no formal diplomatic relations.
The Islamic republic broke off ties with Cairo in 1980 after Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel. Iran subsequently named a street in its capital Tehran in honor of the Islamist assassin who killed Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who had signed the deal.
Ahmadinejad met later Wednesday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the second meeting between the two leaders in the past year. Abbas reportedly expressed his thanks to Iran for supporting the Palestinians upgrade to UN non-member observer state late last year, and discussed attempts of his Fatah faction to reconcile with the Islamist Hamas movement that controls of the Gaza Strip.
[Photo: Jose Cruz / Wikicommons]
