Envoys from the United States and its arch foes Iran and Syria were to sit together to discuss the crisis in Iraq for the first time on Saturday at talks called by the Iraqi prime minister.
Diplomats from Iraq’s neighbours and from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were expected at the Foreign Ministry in war-torn Baghdad for a one-day meeting to seek a regional security consensus.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hopes to persuade Iraq’s neighbours — in particular Iran and Syria — to cut off support for the extremist groups and militias fighting in his country’s sectarian war.
”We will ask all neighbouring countries to stop interfering in Iraqi affairs and to put pressure on the armed groups with whom they have links to end the violence,” Maliki adviser Sami al-Askari said last week.
US commanders accuse Iranian agents of smuggling weapons to Shi’ite militias in Iraq, including components for lethal roadside bombs that have been blamed for the deaths of at least 170 US soldiers since May 2004.
They also accuse Syria of allowing Sunni Arab extremists to cross its borders to join al-Qaeda-linked groups fighting in Iraq.
Officials of Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government in turn accuse Saudi figures of funding Sunni insurgent groups.
Regional governments Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will also join the meeting.
All five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US — were invited, along with the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry, which is just outside the fortified Green Zone, was under tight security ahead of the conference, and sniffer dogs were sent into the building ahead of officials to check for bombs.
The talks mark a shift in US policy, as President George Bush has hitherto steadfastly refused to deal directly with Iran and Syria on Iraq.
He argued that any US approach would lead Tehran to seek concessions in an unrelated dispute with the West over its suspected nuclear-weapons programme, and would encourage Damascus’s efforts to reassert control over Lebanon.
But with Iraq mired in civil war and the White House under pressure to pull US troops out of the country from the opposition Democrats now in control of the US Congress, Bush authorised the face-to-face meetings.
US officials have said they will use the meeting to confront Tehran and Damascus directly with accusations of actively fomenting the violence, and they have also raised the possibility of direct talks.
”If we judge that a bilateral meeting [with Iran] would be useful … we would be willing to do that,” US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said.
But David Satterfield, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top adviser on Iraq, has refused to say whether the Americans will actively seek contacts with the two adversaries on the meeting’s sidelines.
”We will see how this conference unfolds,” he said. ”What the Iranians and the Syrians choose to do is also part and parcel of this.”
Bush said on Friday he hoped the two countries would support the Iraqi government and warned them against stirring unrest in the country.
”Our message to the Syrians and Iranians won’t change at that meeting — which is, we expect you to help this young democracy and we will defend ourselves and the people in Iraq from weapons being shipped,” Bush said.
Maliki has loftily pitched the meeting as an opportunity to forge international ”agreement and harmony”.
”The conference will help heal Iraq and be a base for regional dialogue,” he said. ”Iraq will connect with its neighbours and the world community. The meeting will end in international agreement and harmony.”
Satterfield’s ambitions for the meeting were far more limited.
He said it was a preparatory discussion for a ministerial-level conference of Iraq’s neighbours to be attended by Rice and enlarged to include the Group of Eight industrialised states in April. — AFP
