Azernews.Az

Chairman of the Azerbaijani State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations Elshad Iskandarov is on a visit to the U.S. as part of an exchange program, organised by the State Department, the committee told Trend news agency on Tuesday.

Meetings are planned to be held in the State Department and the U.S. Congress, with the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), as well as representatives of U.S. and religious community think tanks in Washington within the program.

The main purpose of the visit is to discuss the potential of cooperation growth. Moreover, the meetings will focus on such topics as cooperation in combating extremism on religious grounds, the Azerbaijani model of religious tolerance and the state of religious monuments in the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia.

The workshop, to be organised by the Jamestown Foundation on Wednesday, has invited Iskandarov to act as keynote speaker on 'Mutual respect and dialogue between different religions in Azerbaijan'.

Commenting on the points regarding violations of freedom of religion in Azerbaijan, which were contained in the U.S. State Department's annual report on 'Religious Freedom in the World', he explained this by using the narrowness of U.S. information sources. He stressed that the work will be undertaken with U.S counterpart in this area.