Third Parties Seeking to Spoil Iran-Pakistan Ties, Official Warns

“We should not allow third countries, which are totally against security and good neighborliness between Iran and Pakistan, to have negative impact on the friendly ties between the two countries,” Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said in a meeting with Pakistan’s national security advisor, Naseer Khan Janjua.

The two officials met in Moscow on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the 8th International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues.

Elsewhere in the meeting, Shamkhani deplored a terrorist attack on Iranian border guards at the common border with Pakistan that killed 10 troops in late April, describing efforts to control the joint borders and fighting against terrorist groups at the border areas as an absolute necessity.

For his part, the Pakistani official expressed the hope that closer security cooperation between Tehran and Islamabad would stop a recurrence of the terrorist attack on Iranian guards.

Khan Janjua also said that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s recent trip to Pakistan has had a remarkable effect on closer coordination between the two sides in the war on acts of violence along the borders.

Heading a diplomatic and military delegation, Zarif visited Islamabad on May 3 to urge Pakistan to capture and bring to justice perpetrators of the April 26 terrorist attack that killed Iranian troops in Mirjaveh, in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan and Balouchestan.

Following the trip, Pakistan’s army undertook to bolster its control over the areas bordering Iran.