Tehran, Sept 11, IRNA – Officials in Tehran and Cairo are engaged in negotiations aimed at selling Iranian oil to Egypt after years of two major Islamic world countries’ severed diplomatic and economic relations, officials in two capitals informed Monday.
Iran negotiating with Cairo on oil sales to Egypt
Also according to US daily Wall Street Journal, Tehran has proposed selling two million barrels of oil to Cairo worth over 200 million US dollars.
An informed official at National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) confirming the news told IRNA that the two sides have negotiated over the deal, adding, “Egypt might buy a quantity of oil from Iran, but the related negotiations are still in initial phase.”
The Egyptian Oil Minister Osama Kamal, too, has told the Egyptian state daily Al-Ahram, “There is no obstacle in the way of importing Iranian oil and refining it here.”
The Egyptian minister’s comment was made after President Muhammad al-Morsi’s brief visit of Tehran to participate at the XVI Tehran NAM Summit Meeting during which he officially delivered the NAM presidency to the Islamic Republic of Iran for the next three years.
According to the Wall Street Journal, if the deal would be finalized it would seriously enrage Washington and it might lead to further cooling of the Cairo-Washington troubled relations.
In 1939, diplomatic relations between Egypt and Iran were upgraded to ambassadorial level, and Youssef Zulficar Pasha was appointed as Egypt's first ambassador in Tehran. In the same year, Princess Fawzia of Egypt, the sister of King Farouk I, married Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the then crown prince (later shah) of Iran. 'Ties between the countries -- among the largest and most influential in the Middle East -- were severed in 1980 following Iran's Islamic Revolution and Egypt's recognition of Israel.'
Egypt is the only Arab country not to have an embassy in Iran. Contentious issues, include Egypt's signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979, its support for Iraq in Iraqi eight-year imposed war against Iran, the Islamic Republic's hailing of Khalid Islambouli, the revolutionary officer who executed the Zionist ally Anwar Sadat's as a religious hero, seeing as there was both a street and mural named after him (however, the honoree was changed to Muhammad al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during the outset of the Second Intifada while he was embrace by his intimidate father by racist animalistic Zionists), and close Egyptian relations with the United States, and the Zionist regime.
In 2007, relations between the two countries thawed in the fields of diplomacy and economic trade, only to retreat during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict when the Egyptian politicians fully cooperated with the Zionist regime in inhumane Gaza blockade, which equaled mass murder of the residents of that “most populated small patch of land on earth.
Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the appointment of ambassadors after nearly 30 years, the Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi made an historic first visit to Iran since the Islamic revolution for the Non-Aligned Movement's summit on 30 August, where he handed over the rotating presidency of NAM to Iran.
Courtesy: Wikipedia, for the background
