SHARM SHEIKH, May 4: Iraq urged its neighbours on Friday to stop militants sneaking into Iraq and, at talks in Egypt on stemming bloodshed, is expected to ask the Arab League to hold a conference on national reconciliation.
Iraq made the call to its six neighbouring states at a conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that also brought together the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the European Union and the Group of Eight leading industrialised countries.
“We will not allow terrorist organisations to use Iraqi territory as a safe haven,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told an opening session of the one-day conference.
“That is what drives us to call on the regional neighbours to prevent the infiltration of terrorist groups into Iraq and to stop them obtaining material support and political and media support.”
The talks are due to focus on border security, Iraqi refugees and political reconciliation between Iraqi factions and ethnic and religious communities.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said a draft final communique from the conference was expected to call on the Arab League to convene a national reconciliation conference for Iraq.
“We are ready for this. We are ready to host Iraqi national reconciliation,” he said. “Now is not the time to exchange accusations but is the time to work together.”
Moussa gave no time frame as to when such a meeting could take place, nor did he say where it would be held. The 22-member Arab League is based in Cairo.
Baghdad is dependent on US military support in its drive to halt a slide into all-out civil war by stamping out sectarian violence and defeating insurgents who draw support from the Sunni Arab minority once-dominant under Saddam Hussein.
US-IRAN: Iran and the United States dashed hopes of a major breakthrough at the conference when they held only mid-level talks on Friday.
The two-day meeting, however, wrapped up after a marked improvement in Washington's strained relations with Iran's traditional Syrian allies, signalling an apparent shift of US policy in the region.
Speculation had mounted since Thursday's start of the conference in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could hold historic talks with her Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki.
But at a meeting designed to enhance international cooperation on Iraqi security, Mottaki described US troops as “terrorists” and lashed out at Washington over the continued detention of Iranian officials seized in January.
“To create a safe haven for those terrorists who try to turn Iraqi territory into a base for attacking Iraq's neighbours should be condemned,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
“Mr Mottaki was referring to countries which, like the United States, carry out acts of terrorism in Iraq,” a spokesman for the Iranian delegation at the conference told AFP.
“When the United States arrests five Iranian diplomats in Iraq, it is an act of terrorism,” he said on condition of anonymity.
On January 11, US troops dropped from helicopters and stormed an Iranian liaison office in Arbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi Kurdistan region, and detained six employees, one of whom was later released.
The United States has said the men had links to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and none of them held diplomatic passports.
The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, told reporters at the Pentagon that American forces were in fact holding seven Iranians but did not elaborate where and when the other two were arrested.—Agencies
