Region | Iraq
Stop backing Iraqi militias, Iran told
The United States urged Iran yesterday to stop supporting militias in Iraq but described the two countries' most high-profile meeting in almost 30 years as positive.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:00 May 29, 2007
- Image Credit: Reuters
- Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Iraq, his Iranian counterpart Hassan Kazemi-Qomi and Nouri Al Maliki in talks on security in Iraq at the Iraqi prime minister's office in Baghdad yesterday.
Baghdad: The United States urged Iran yesterday to stop supporting militias in Iraq but described the two countries' most high-profile meeting in almost 30 years as positive.
Washington accuses Iran of arming, funding and training Shiite militias who are fuelling Iraq's spiral into sectarian civil war, a charge Iran denies. The US military has also shown sophisticated bombs it says are killing US soldiers.
The meeting marked a shift in the US policy of shunning almost all contact with Iranian officials since Washington severed formal diplomatic ties with Tehran in 1980, 14 months after Iran's Islamic Revolution and five months after Americans were seized in a hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran.
It did not touch on Iran's controversial nuclear programme, the most contentious issue in US-Iranian relations.
Refer to Washington
Crocker said the Iranians had proposed setting up a mechanism with Iranian, US and Iraqi participation to coordinate on Iraq's security.
He said he would refer the proposal to Washington but that the US aim of the meeting had not been to organise further talks but to lay out its concerns.
Kazemi-Qomi told reporters that Iran had offered to help train and arm Iraq's military.
Crocker said he had told the Iranians they must end their support for the militias, stop supplying them with explosives and ammunition and rein in the activities of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Qods Force in Iraq.
"It is dangerous for Iraq ... and dangerous for the region because it can cause widespread instability," Crocker told a news briefing.
Crocker said the Iranians had rejected the allegations but did not respond in detail. In turn, they had criticised the "occupying" US military's training and equipping of the new Iraqi army, saying it was "inadequate to the challenges faced".
"In terms of what happens next we are going to want to wait and see not what is said next but what happens on the ground, whether we start to see some indications of change of Iranian behaviour."
He said there was broad agreement between both sides in their policy on Iraq.
Both countries supported Nouri Al Maliki's government and wanted to see a stable, federal Iraq that controlled its own security.
In a brief address to the delegations before the start of the talks, Al Maliki said Iraq would not be a launchpad for any attacks on neighbouring states, an apparent reference to Iranian fears of a US attack. It would also not brook any regional interference in its affairs, he added.
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