Iran offers security help to Iraqi PM

IRAN: Iran's president pledged undying support for Baghdad's new government telling Iraq's visiting prime minister and fellow Shi'ite Islamist, Nuri al-Maliki, that Tehran would help him end the violence at home.

The United States, wary of the relationship building between its Iranian adversaries and Iraqi leaders brought to power by the U.S. invasion, again accused Tehran of funding "terrorists" in Iraq and said its biggest contribution would be to stop.

It was a sentiment aired by Iraqi officials before Maliki's first official visit to his bigger, powerful neighbour but which was left unsaid in public on the first day of his trip.

"We will give our full assistance to the Iraqi government to establish security," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a joint news conference after meeting Maliki in Tehran.

Renewing his calls for the 145,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to go home, he was later quoted by official news agency IRNA saying: "Iran and Iraq, as two brotherly countries, will remain beside each other forever, and uninvited guests will leave the region."

Ahmadinejad, whose attachment to developing nuclear technology and antipathy to Israel has earned him Washington's anger, also spoke positively of Iraq's "integrity".

That might be a response to accusations from Iraq's Sunni minority and the Sunni rulers of the rest of the Arab world that non-Arab Iran might back a Shi'ite breakaway in oil-rich southern Iraq under Iraq's U.S.-backed federal constitution.

Maliki, whose spokesman said that the main message for Iran was that it should not "interfere" in Iraq, made little comment: "This visit will be useful for cooperation between Iran and Iraq, in all political, security and economic fields."

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie told Iraqi state television one of the main agreements concerned tightening security on the lengthy border. U.S. and British officials accuse Iranian militants of supplying high-powered bombs and financing to Iraqis fighting their troops.

U.S. President George W. Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said: "The most important thing that Iran can do is not be part of the problem by financing separatist groups and terrorist groups who are trying to undermine democracy in Iraq."

On the eve of the two-day visit, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters Maliki would deliver a blunt message that Iran should not interfere in Iraq although he stopped short of endorsing U.S. charges of Iranian "meddling".

Tehran, Reuters, Wednesday