Officials from regional states including Iran and Syria will join US and British envoys at a meeting in Baghdad next month to seek ways to stabilise Iraq, the Iraqi foreign minister said today.
Iraq foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari
The mid-March meeting would be a chance for Western and regional powers to try to bridge some of their differences over Iraq, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said.
"Our hope is that this will be an ice-breaking attempt for maybe holding other meetings in the future. We want Iraq, instead of being a divisive issue, to be a unifying issue," Mr Zebari said.
In December, a report by the bipartisan US Iraq Study Group recommended direct talks with Damascus and Tehran to persuade them to help stem violence in Iraq.
President Bush has not ruled out a regional conference on Iraq involving Iran and Syria, but the White House has indicated Iraq would have to set it up.
Underscoring the chaos in Iraq, car bombs and other blasts in Baghdad killed nine people and wounded 25 despite a new US-backed security offensive in the capital, police said.
Yesterday, vice president Adel Abdul-Mahdi suffered minor wounds when a bomb killed seven at the Public Works Ministry.
The dead included a deputy minister, who died from his wounds on Monday evening.