Iraq president to visit Iran as another 78 killed
Pastor Dale Morgan
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Tuesday November 21, 5:24 AM
*Iraq president to visit Iran as another 78 killed*
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is to fly to Iran this weekend for talks
with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aides said, as bombers and death
squads claimed another 78 lives across Iraq.
"The president will go to Iran this weekend and meet the Iranian
president. The two will discuss a range of issues including the current
situation in Iraq," a source close to the president said.
An MP for the main Shiite bloc which leads the government confirmed that
Talabani was scheduled to travel to Iran on Saturday.
"He is going to Iran because he was invited a long time ago by the
Iranian president himself," Bassem Sharif said, referring to reports in
the Iranian official media earlier this month of an impending visit.
Sharif added that there was a possibility that President Bashar al-Assad
of Iran's regional ally Syria might join the Tehran talks, following a
landmark visit to Baghdad this week by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid
Muallem.
But Talabani's spokesman Hiwa Othman denied that such a summit was in
the pipeline.
"There is no such three-way summit in Tehran and our president is
looking forward to meet his Syrian counterpart in Damascus at some point
of time," Othman told AFP.
But other government officials said that the restoration of diplomatic
relations between Iraq and Syria, broken off more than a quarter of a
century ago, was in the offing and that an announcement might be made
before Muallem wraps up his visit Tuesday.
The ousted regime of Saddam Hussein broke off diplomatic relations with
Syria in 1980 in protest at its support for Iran in its eight-year war
with Iraq that broke out that year.
The talk of a meeting between Talabani and his Iranian and Syrian
counterparts comes amid growing pressure on the US administration to
review its coldshouldering of the two Iraqi neighbours.
Washington expressed scepticism Monday that the weekend talks would lead
to progress on the ground.
State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said senior Iraqi and
Iranian officials had met in the past, "and we haven't seen much by way
of follow-up on it. The problem is not what they say, the problem is
what they do," he said.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told Muallem that Iraq would not be a
proxy battleground for Syria and the United States to settle their
differences.
"If Syria or any other state has differences with the United States,
it's their own business," Maliki told reporters during a joint news
conference with Muallem, the first Syrian minister to visit Baghdad
since the US-led invasion of 2003.
"It should settle these differences, but not at our cost."
Muallem denied Syria wanted to see instability grip its eastern neighbour.
"Danger to Iraq is danger for the entire region," he said.
Muallem's visit comes amid US charges that Syria has failed to prevent
militants from crossing the border into Iraq to fuel the insurgency.
US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said that up to 70
foreign fighters were entering Iraq by crossing the Syrian border and 20
percent of those fighters captured in Iraq were Syrians.
On Sunday, Iraqi authorities announced that a suicide bomber who
attacked building labourers in the Shiite city of Hilla just south of
the capital and killed 22 people was a Syrian.
The violence continued unabated Monday with insurgents setting their
sights on Iraq's beleaguered government.
A Shiite deputy health minister, Hakim al-Zamili, said he escaped an
assassination bid in which gunmen killed two of his bodyguards.
Fellow Shiite official Mohammed Abbas al-Oraibi, a minister without
portfolio, emerged unscathed from a roadside bombing against his convoy
on the outskirts of the capital, one of his aides told AFP.
In other violence on Monday, 78 people were killed or found murdered,
officials said.
Police said they found 60 bodies in and around Baghdad of men kidnapped,
tortured and killed execution style in apparent sectarian attacks.
In rebel attacks at least 16 others were killed in shootings and
bombings, including popular satirist and broadcaster Walid Hassan, whose
weekly show "Caricature" on Iraq's Al-Sharqiya channel poked fun at the
sectarian politics gripping the country.
Two more US servicemen died in Iraq, the military said, taking its
losses since the invasion to 2,861, according to an AFP count based on
Pentagon figures.