President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has invited his Iraqi and Syrian counterparts to an unprecedented three-way summit in Tehran this weekend to discuss the crisis in Iraq.
The meeting is designed in part to promote his role as a responsible regional player rather than the rogue maverick he is often portrayed as in the West. It will also help to boost Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who had poor relations with Iraq’s President, Jalal Talabani, until recently.
The announcement of the summit came as Syria’s Foreign Minister, Walid Moallem, ended the first high-level visit to Baghdad since the United States-led invasion in April 2003. Both sides have talked of restoring diplomatic relations, which were broken in 1982 when Damascus sided with Tehran after Iraq attacked Iran. Syria’s security was intimately linked to Iraq’s, Moallem said in Baghdad on Sunday.
The weekend summit was confirmed by Khaled Salih, the spokesperson of the Kurdish regional government in Irbil. ”President Talabani will attend the meeting, which will be the first trilateral summit of its kind,” he said on Monday night. Talabani is a Kurd who also heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main parties in the autonomous Kurdish part of Iraq.
Iran already has close relations with the Iraqi government. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa party, as well as the largest Iraqi Shia party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were based in Iran in exile during the Saddam Hussein era.
US officials have repeatedly accused Syria of allowing former Ba’athist insurgents as well as al-Qaeda sympathisers to pass into Iraq from Syria. The Iraqi Ba’athists are said to have training camps in Syria — a charge that Syria denies. It says it cannot control its long, largely desert border with Iraq but has improved security patrols in response to US requests.
”We don’t know how much they [Syria] are assisting this effort, but we don’t know how much they are trying to preclude it either,” a US military spokesperson, Major General William Caldwell, said in Baghdad on Monday. ”We still see foreign fighters, between 70 and 100 a month, coming across the Syrian border into Iraq,” he said, figures that are similar to those of last year. He said US and Iraqi soldiers had killed 425 foreign fighters so far this year and captured 670. Twenty percent of them were Syrian, a similar percentage Egyptian, and most of the rest were from Sudan and Saudi Arabia.
The fighters move to the province of Anbar, where US forces have been taking constant casualties, as well as to Mosul and its governorate, where bombings and assassinations are frequent. Iraqi officials in Mosul have called on Syria to rein in the insurgents and expel them.
”If Syria really wants good relations and to open a new page with Iraq, it could make a big difference,” said Khasro Goran, Mosul’s deputy governor.
He referred to Syria’s clampdown a few years ago on the extreme Kurdish group, the PKK, which led to the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, its leader. ”They gave the PKK leaders 24 hours to leave Syria and they did,” he said. ”I can’t say the terrorism will be defeated. But it’ll be reduced by 50%.”
The three-way summit this weekend would be an important forerunner for a wider meeting of Iraq and all its neighbours which the independent study group under James Baker is expected to propose when it produces its report for President George Bush shortly. Inside the US administration the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is widely reported to be against any accommodation with Iran, and is still pressing for military action if Tehran refuses to give up its nuclear ambitions.
However, he is facing isolation after it was announced that Donald Rumsfeld, his principal ally, would be replaced at the Pentagon by Robert Gates, a former CIA official who has argued for talks with Iran.
According to the New Yorker magazine, Cheney’s position has been further weakened by a CIA analysis that cast doubt on White House assumptions on how long it would take Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Sensors placed by US and Israeli agents near suspected nuclear sites had not picked up significant radioactivity, the report said, and there was little other hard evidence that a secret nuclear weapons programme was under way.
”The intelligence community assessment is that they are engaged in a nuclear weapons programme, but there is not enough intelligence to prove it, or to say what its current status is,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorist operations. ”The CIA is just being very cautious. And that is what the ideologues don’t like. It’s the same old story, but the intelligence analysts are pushing back, unlike in 2002.” – Guardian Unlimited Â