Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki visits Iran
He hopes to use the two-day visit, including a meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad, to allay Tehran's concerns about U.S. influence over Iraq.
Reporting from Baghdad — Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki arrived in Iran today for a two-day visit with top leaders, in which he is expected to allay Tehran's concerns about the United States' continuing influence over Iraq.
The visit is Maliki's fourth since he was elected and comes just days after the U.S. handed over military control of the Green Zone to Iraq and began a drawdown calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Iran initially opposed the pact, accusing Americans of seeking to maintain its dominance over Iraq. American officials, for their part, have complained of Iran's influence in next-door neighbor Iraq, including its ability to sway radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
Iraqi party: An article in the Jan. 4 Section A about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's visit to Iran identified Iraqi Education Minister Khudair Khuzai and lawmaker Abdul Hadi Husseini as members of the Islamic Dawa Party. The two men belong to Islamic Dawa-Iraq, a separate group that is running candidates on the same slate as the Islamic Dawa Party in upcoming provincial elections.
Iran's influence in Iraq has grown significantly since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which toppled the Sunni-dominated government of President Saddam Hussein, a longtime foe of Shiite-run Iran.
Maliki, himself a Shiite, met today with Iranian Vice President Parviz Dawoodi.
Maliki is expected to discuss economic, transportation and electricity issues with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday.
"Our security achievements and redeeming Iraq from the sectarian war gave us the chance to exert more efforts to accelerate the process of reconstruction and development, which needs the presence of neighboring countries' companies," Maliki said in a statement.
Parliament member Abdul Hadi Husseini, a member of Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, said Maliki's visit was aimed, in part, to "make Iran more comfortable and to remove any fear that Iraq could be used as a base" in the future by Western military forces. "This has been a sticking point for some time between Iran and America and Iran and the rest of world," Husseini said.
Iraq's minister of education, Khudair Khuzai, also a member of Maliki's party, said Maliki had an additional aim: seeking to help improve relations between the U.S. and Iran.
"We believe that having any tension between those countries will reflect negatively on Iraq," Khuzai said. "Iraq wants to be a [bridge] between both countries."
Iraq's ministers of trade, transportation and electricity traveled to Iran with Maliki. Husseini said Iraq was seeking to buy power from Iran and revive supply lines between the two countries into southern Iraq.
Also today, U.S. military officials said they shot and wounded an Iraqi TV journalist who they said was acting suspiciously and failed to respond to warnings in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad on Thursday. American soldiers followed "approved defensive measures" after the woman failed to respond to repeated warnings from Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers, officials said. The soldiers fired two rounds, officials said. Beladi television identified the woman as Hadeel Emad, a journalist working for the station. She was taken to Yarmouk hospital, where her left kidney was removed during a four-hour operation.
kimi.yoshino@latimes.com
Times staff writers Saif Hameed, Ali Hameed and correspondents in Baghdad contributed to this report.
