CAIRO: After 27 years of non-existent relations, the United States and Iran held the first policy-level talks between them in Iraq Monday since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi will meet his American counterpart Ryan Crocker at an “Iraqi government facility according to State Department spokesman Tom Casey, AFP reported.
This is the highest level official talks between the two countries since relations were broken off in 1980 because of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
Talks will center on how to curb the chaos that ensues in Iraq, but will not touch on any other topics such as Iran’s aims to develop nuclear capabilities.
“These talks will not affect our nuclear issue, because we are not interested, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, told ISNA news agency on Sunday.
“The talks will solely focus on the stability and security of Iraq as it has been requested by Iraqi people and government, he added.
Casey also reiterated this, saying, “It s not a forum for discussion about other events.
The meeting comes after interactions, later downplayed, between American and Iranian officials at the Iraq Compact conference held in Sharm El-Sheikh earlier this month.
Spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, said the meeting was imperative for the future of Iraq.
“Bad relations between the two countries does not serve Iraq, and Iraq has paid the price for the tension between the two countries, he told reporters last Wednesday, “We don t want Iraq to be an arena for fighting between the two sides.
However, some experts believe that it will take more than Iran and the US meeting to solve the crisis in Iraq.
Mohammed Abdel Salam, Military Studies and Iraq expert at Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies previously told The Daily Star Egypt that “what is needed in Iraq is a grand bargain between the government and the Sunnis and the militias . it is Iraqis themselves who are fighting and they need to find an agreement among themselves first.
However, it is known that Iraqi factions have different foreign backers, and that an agreement between Iran and the US could alleviate the crisis, despite Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent comments while in the Middle East that there is no “proxy war going on in Iraq between the US and Iran.
The US believes Iran is fuelling the fires in Iraq by supporting and arming Shia militias, while Iran counteracts that it is the presence of foreign occupiers in the form of US troops that is fanning the flames of violence in Iraq.
