Ahmadinejad invites Iraq and Syria to summit on insurgency
Pastor Dale Morgan
Ahmadinejad invites Iraq and Syria to summit on insurgency*
· Move designed to boost Iranian leader's standing
· Talks could be forerunner to meeting involving US
Jonathan Steele in Irbil, northern Iraq
Tuesday November 21, 2006
The Guardian
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 US-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, Mr Moallem said in Baghdad on Sunday.
The weekend summit was confirmed by Khaled Salih, the spokesman of the
Kurdish regional government in Irbil. "President Talabani will attend
the meeting, which will be the first trilateral summit of its kind," he
told the Guardian last night. Mr 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-Qaida 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 spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, said in Baghdad
yesterday "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, Mr 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."