Talks between U.S. and Iranian diplomats over the future of Iraq have been set for May 28 here, officials announced Thursday.
Both sides, however, downplayed the chances of a breakthrough, with some observers cautioning that Washington had more riding on the outcome than Tehran.
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The meeting would mark the first major discussions between the two nations since the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Iran enjoys close ties with leading Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish political parties and has a strong trade relationship with its neighbor.
“Nothing but Iraq is on the agenda for Iran and U.S. talks,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters at a conference of Islamic foreign ministers in Islamabad.
Mottaki ruled out the possibility the talks could be widened to include Iran’s nuclear program or normalizing ties with Washington.
“The talks will strictly be focused on the security situation in Iraq,” he said, adding Iraq would attend as a third party. The minister did not name the diplomats who would be attending for Tehran.
The U.S. team is expected to air its allegation that Iran is supplying armor-piercing bombs to Shiite Muslim militias to attack American troops. U.S. officials have also accused Iran of providing weapons both to Shiite death squads and to their main enemy, Sunni Arab extremists.
Iran wants the U.S. to release five Iranian diplomats arrested in Irbil in February. Mottaki reiterated Iranian assertions that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is a major cause of the continuing violence.
“Terrorists say that ‘We are doing this because of the foreign forces,’ and the foreign forces [are] saying that ‘We are here because of the terrorist groups,’
” Mottaki said.
Confirming the date of the talks, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tehran must start to live up to its pledges regarding Baghdad.
“They talk about the fact that they want a stable, secure, prosperous Iraq. Well, their actions are not … helping to produce a more stable, secure Iraq. So we’ll see what they do,” McCormack told reporters.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq who will lead the American delegation, told reporters in Baghdad: “I would not expect a stunning, startling breakthrough. We would like to see some progress on Iraq-related issues.”
The groundwork for the talks was laid earlier this month at a conference on Iraq attended by regional countries and Washington in the resort of Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. That session was a follow-up to a gathering in March in Baghdad, where the sides briefly chatted.
“There is an opportunity here for them, I think, to move into a whole new era in a relationship with a stable, secure, democratic Iraq that threatens none of its neighbors, including Iran,” Crocker said. “But to get there, they need to start doing some more constructive things than they have.”
The United States and Iran severed ties in 1980 after the widely hated U.S.-backed shah was ousted and students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats captive.
Underscoring the difficulties of talks, President Bush on Thursday threatened further UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear energy program.
On Wednesday, Iraq’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced Iran would use the upcoming negotiations to lecture the United States about what it did wrong in Iraq.