BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The Iranian foreign minister yesterday called for Iraq’s neighbours to hold a meeting to discuss Iraqi security after Baghdad accused Syria of harbouring the planners of two massive bomb attacks.
Separately, Turkey’s foreign minister is to visit Iraq and Syria tomorrow to try to soothe relations between the two.
Since 2003, tensions — prone to flare-ups since around the time Saddam came to power in 1979 — have centred on charges from Iraq’s US-backed government that Syria, estranged from Washington, has allowed insurgents to stream into Iraq.
Iraqi politicians have also lashed out at Saudi Arabia for inciting Sunni Islamist insurgents, a charge the kingdom denies. And while Baghdad’s relations with Tehran are cordial, the US military complains that Iran arms and trains Shi’ite militia.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s relations with Kuwait to the south are strained as Baghdad chafes at Kuwait’s insistence it continue to pay billions of dollars in reparations for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion.
Relations with western neighbour Jordan have been on the mend, and ties with Turkey have taken a noticeable turn for the better in the past year.
“We hope to get the cooperation and approval of all neighbouring countries for this meeting,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters through a translator during a visit to Iraq.
There have been several regional meetings on the conflict in Iraq since the US-led ouster of Saddam in 2003, but Iraq’s ties with its neighbours are fragile.
Iraqi officials frequently blame neighbouring countries for the violence that continues to rock the country more than six years after the US-led invasion.
“Maintaining security and stability in Iraq, or losing it, has a direct impact on all of Iraq’s neighbouring countries,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a statement.
While sectarian slaughter between majority Shi’ites and once dominant Sunnis in Iraq has subsided, bombings attributed to Sunni Islamist groups such as al Qaeda continue as US forces begin to gradually withdraw ahead of an end-2011 deadline. Many in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam which follows a strict brand of the Sunni faith called Wahhabism, see Persian Iran, a Shi’ite Muslim country, as their arch enemy.
