Iraq’s prime minister will deliver a blunt message to fellow Shiite Islamist leaders in Iran on Tuesday that they should not interfere in Iraqi affairs.
It is a message that may please Nuri al-Maliki’s sponsors in the United States, who accuse Iran of funding and training militants fighting U.S. forces in Iraq, possibly in response to mounting U.S. pressure on Tehran to halt its nuclear program.
Maliki met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on arrival on Tuesday in Tehran and was expected to meet on Wednesday Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the highest authority in Iran, and influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Stopping short of explicitly endorsing U.S. accusations of Iranian “meddling” in Iraq, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Monday: “We want to pass a message to the Iranian leaders that Iraq needs good relations with neighboring countries, without interference in our internal affairs.”
Iran’s official news agency IRNA said Maliki, during his two-day trip, would discuss “ways to reinforce the mutual relationship, as well as Iraqi, regional and world issues.”
While officially encouraging Iraq’s new, warm ties to Washington’s adversary, there is unease in the United States at Iranian influence over the Shiite leaders brought to power in elections that followed the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Since forming a national unity government four months ago, Maliki has vowed to curb militant Shiite factions, some of whom also have links with movements in Iran, as part of efforts to avert civil war with Saddam’s once-dominant Sunni minority.
Under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated secular regime Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s.
U.S. and British officials say high-powered explosives used against their troops in the past year have been supplied through Iran, though not necessarily with government approval.
Some leaders in Tehran are also close to the likes of radical, young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia is seen as particularly hostile to the occupying forces.
Mediation
Dabbagh said Baghdad saw Khamenei playing a key role in relations with Iraq and stressed security would top the agenda.
“We understand that the violence in Iraq is being fed and financed by others. Some of them are countries, some are groups ... We’d like neighboring countries to share in stopping such things coming to Iraq,” he said.
Some Iraqi Shiite leaders have offered to mediate between Iran and Washington, which have not had diplomatic relations since Tehran’s Islamic revolution in 1979.
Asked if mediation would feature in Maliki’s talks, Dabbagh said: “Iraqis would like to see a normal relationship between the United States and Iran ... Iraq has been used to pass messages between the United States and Iran. We want to avoid all tension.”
Maliki’s visit follows trips to Arab states run by Sunni Muslims who view with suspicion Iraq’s Shiite majority and its ties to non-Arab, Shiite Iran.
Should Iraq’s sectarian conflict descend into all-out civil war, some analysts say other regional powers would be drawn in, with Iran backing the Shiites and the likes of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states providing help to the insurgent Sunni minority.
In one of the latest acts of violence, Iraqi state-run television reported on Tuesday that gunmen attacked overnight a Shiite mosque in a town south of the ethnically volatile city of Baqouba, killing seven and wounding others.
The rise of the Shiite majority has brought to power in Iraq many leaders who spent long years in exile in Iran. Though Maliki was mostly based in Syria, many of those close to him in the Dawa party found refuge in Iran.
