At Meeting on Iraq, Doubt and Detente

Nations Manage to Find a Way Forward As U.S. Meets Briefly With Iran, Syria

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, repeated his government's call for the withdrawal of "foreign occupying forces" from Iraq. (By Emilio Morenatti -- Associated Press)

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, May 4 -- Mutually suspicious and doubtful, Iraq's neighbors and benefactors nonetheless agreed here Friday on a shared vision for the beleaguered country's future and pledged to work together to help achieve it.

The Bush administration contributed by ending its long diplomatic isolation of Iran and Syria, both of which it accuses of backing violent forces in Iraq. Two senior administration officials had a brief and largely symbolic conversation with an Iranian official Friday morning, a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held bilateral talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem. Administration officials said they expected the contact, limited to Iraq issues, to continue if it brought results.

During a news briefing at the end of a conference of foreign ministers at this Egyptian resort, Rice pronounced the international gathering "extraordinary."

No one claimed that Iraq's severe problems or the growing sectarian tensions among the region's competing powers had been resolved.

In a final communique, government representatives from the region, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the Group of Eight industrialized nations pledged to support Iraqi democracy and sovereignty and condemned violence there. They said they would work to prevent the transit of fighters and weapons through their territories and would help Iraq strengthen its security forces.

In return, the Iraqi government promised to accelerate and expand political reforms to reconcile ethnic groups and religious factions, and to work to disband and disarm "all militias and illegally armed groups without exception."

Iraq made similar pledges in an agreement reached with a larger international group that met here Thursday to discuss political and economic reforms and forgiveness of Iraq's foreign debt.

"There was a lot of suspicion, a lot of mistrust," in several directions, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari acknowledged during a news conference. Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors, with Saudi Arabia in the lead, accused Baghdad's Shiite-dominated government of stalling on key reforms benefiting Iraq's Sunni minority.

"It is in my country's interest to see a reduction of this tension," Zebari said.

Signs of mistrust surfaced in speeches Friday. "Every day now in Iraq proves that a continuation of the current situation will lead to dangerous results, not only for Iraq but for its neighbors," said the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal. "All of us should reject attempts" to make Iraq "an arena for competition between internal and regional powers or an area for terrorist and extremist operations."

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki repeated his government's call for the withdrawal of "foreign occupying forces" from Iraq and called the arrest by U.S. forces there of five Iranian officials a "brazen" violation of international law.

The Bush administration has accused Iran of training and arming Shiite militia groups.