Iran to cancel visa requirements for some Egyptians

Iran will cancel visa requirements for Egyptian merchants and tourists, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told Egypt’s state news agency on Wednesday.

He also said relations between the two countries, who broke ties in 1979, were improving “every day”.

Salehi is visiting Cairo with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an Islamic summit. Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian head of state to visit Egypt since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Egypt has not gone so well, as he was lectured by the top Sunni Cleric, mobbed by aggressive glad-handers, and someone threw a shoe at him.

Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb, grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni Muslim learning warned the visiting Iranian president President that Bahrain is a red line. He also urged the Iranian leader to grant the Sunnis of Iran their full rights .

The trip has not also gone so well for president Morsi, either, who picked an odd time to play host to Ahmadinejad and Iran. Secularists and liberals are already furious with Morsi for allowing his religious Muslim Brotherhood party to take over the revolution, while the mostly Sunni and Salafist parties are appalled at the idea of buddying up to Iran. With protesters spending most of the last two weeks camped outside his house with Molotov cocktails, inviting the most hated guy in the neighborhood to stop by may not have been Morsi’s best political move, according to observers.

A Syrian man who was identified as Ezzeddin Khalil Jassem was the one who threw his shoe at Ahmadinejad during his visit to a Cairo mosque on Tuesday. Jassem who hails from the Syrian city of Aleppo later told Anadol News Agency that had he been closer to Ahmadinejad he would have strangled him and this would have been nothing compared to the tens of thousands of Syrians that the regime has killed with help of the Iranians.

Photo: Ezzeddin Khalil Jassem , the Syrian man who threw his shoe at president Ahmadinejad during his visit to a Cairo mosque on Tuesday. Jassem who hails from the Syrian city of Aleppo later told Anadol News Agency that had he been closer to Ahmadinejad he would have strangled him and this would have been nothing compared to the tens of thousands of Syrians that the regime has killed with help of the Iranians.