BAGHDAD: Iraq’s prime minister on Saturday inaugurated construction work on what is slated to become the first railway line connecting the country to neighboring Iran, a major political and economic partner. The “Basra-Chalamja connection project” will link the major port city of Basra in southern Iraq to Iran’s vast railway network through the Chalamja border crossing, an transport ministry official told AFP. It is estimated that the project will take “between 18 and 24 months”. The goal is to be able to transport “travelers from the Islamic Republic of Iran and Central Asian countries” to Shiite holy cities, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani said in a speech.

He noted that the project had been under discussion for years before an agreement was reached in 2021. During Saturday’s ceremony, Sudani laid a symbolic foundation stone alongside Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber. Sudani thanked Tehran for planned demining operations at the border to clear the way for the train line and for a railway bridge over the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge before spilling into the Gulf. Iraq and Iran fought an eight-year war in the 1980s after Saddam Hussein invaded his neighbor in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

Mokhber hailed the “strategic” project that he said would be completed “over the next two years”, Iranian state media reported him as saying. Half of the 32 km of rail track planned will be on the Iran side of the border, its official IRNA news agency said. War-ravaged and beset by rampant corruption, oil-rich Iraq suffers from dilapidated infrastructure, including outdated highways and railways. Sudani’s government has been working on forging a growing number of regional partnerships. In May, Baghdad unveiled a $17-billion project known as the “Route of Development” for a road and railway stretching 1,200 km from Iraq’s northern border with Turkey to the Gulf in the south.

Meanwhile, a collision between two minibuses killed 18 people, mostly Iranian pilgrims, north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, medical officials said on Saturday. The “horrible accident” occurred between Dujail and Samarra, state news agency INA said, citing Khaled Burhan, director of health services in Salaheddin province. The minibuses crashed into each other shortly before midnight Friday, leaving 18 people dead and 15 injured, a medical official in Salaheddin told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. One of the drivers was believed to have fallen asleep at the wheel, the same source said, citing the accounts of witnesses.

Among the dead were 14 Iranians, two Afghans and two people yet to be identified, another hospital official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity. The dead included the two drivers, said an official from the area’s traffic authority. That official, who also referred to reports of a driver falling asleep, said one of the minibuses had veered into the opposite lane. INA had initially reported a toll of 16 dead and 13 injured and said that those killed were Shiite Muslim pilgrims from neighboring Iran. Almost exactly a year ago, on Sept 11, 11 Iranian Shiite pilgrims and their Iraqi driver died when their minibus collided with a truck in Babil province, south of Baghdad, a health official said at the time.

Millions of Shiite pilgrims, many of them from Iran, head each year to the holy shrine city of Karbala for Arbaeen, one of the world’s biggest religious gatherings. More than 2.6 million pilgrims have flown into Iraq or crossed its land borders since Arbaeen began this year, according to figures issued on Friday by Iraq’s interior ministry. Road accidents are a recurring accompaniment to Arbaeen, which concludes Sept 6-7 this year. On Monday and Tuesday, four road accidents claimed the lives of 20 people and injured dozens more, mostly Iranian pilgrims. Those accidents occurred in the southern provinces of Wassit and Dhi Qar, near the border with Iran.

Conflict, neglect and endemic corruption have left oil-rich Iraq’s infrastructure, including roads and bridges, in disrepair. Officials also say speed, mobile phone use and driving while impaired contribute to crashes. Last year in Iraq, road accidents claimed the lives of more than 4,900 people, an average of 13 per day, according to health ministry data. Separately, naval forces of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seized a ship “carrying smuggled fuel” in the Gulf and arrested four crewmembers, local media reported Saturday.

“More than 50,000 liters of smuggled fuel were discovered” on board on the ship, Fars news agency quoted the chief justice of the coastal Hormozgan province, Mojtaba Ghahramani, as saying. He said the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps navy had “confiscated” the ship and “arrested four people” during the operation. Neither the origin of the ship nor the date of the operation were immediately disclosed. Ghahramani said the fuel would be redirected to the country’s “legal distribution network”.

The United States military has in recent weeks beefed up its presence in the Gulf after accusing Iran of seizing or attempting to take ships in the vital waterway. On July 6, the US Navy said the Guards seized a commercial vessel in the Gulf, a day after it accused Iranian forces of two similar attempts off the coast of Oman. Iran later said the vessel seized in the Gulf was carrying “more than one million liters of smuggled fuel”. – AFP