Rouhani arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport on Saturday morning local time and was welcomed by Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri.

Before Rouhani’s departure from New York on Friday, the Iranian president and his American counterpart Barack Obama held a telephone conversation. The call was the first direct communication between an Iranian and a US president since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The two presidents stressed Tehran and Washington’s political will to swiftly resolve the West’s dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program, and exchanged viewpoints on various topics, including cooperation on different regional issues.

Political figures and analysts have extensively lauded Rouhani’s speech at the UN General Assembly and his numerous interviews and meetings in New York as well as several other meetings between officials from Iran and other countries, including Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s talks with his counterparts on the sidelines of the event.

During his New York visit, Rouhani, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), also addressed the opening of the NAM’s Ministerial Meeting on Cooperation for the Rule of Law at the International Level, held at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday.

The Iranian chief executive also sat down with his opposite numbers from France, Austria, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey and Lebanon as well as the UN secretary general and his deputies, prime ministers of Italy and Spain, the German foreign minister, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the UN special representative for Syria and the heads of other diplomatic delegations at the UN.

HH/HH