Iran delegate meets US envoy Holbrooke

01/04/2009| IslamWeb

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, has held "cordial talks" with Iranian deputy foreign minister Mehdi Akhoondzadeh on the sidelines of the Afghanistan summit in The Hague, Netherlands.

The United States also directly gave a letter to Tehran seeking help to resolve three separate cases involving Americans, one a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran two years ago.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "welcomed" Iran's participation at the Hague conference on Afghanistan, which she proposed and personally had urged Tehran to attend.

"In the course of the conference today, our special representative for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, had a brief and cordial exchange with the head of the Iranian delegation," Secretary Clinton told a news conference on Tuesday after the one-day meeting on Afghanistan.

She said the meeting between the two officials was unplanned, adding that it was "a promising sign that there will be future co-operation". She added that the two officials had agreed to "stay in touch".

"I think the fact that they came today, that they intervened today is a promising sign that there will be future cooperation," Clinton said.

Presence of foreign troops criticized

Clinton said a letter was handed directly to the Iranian delegation at the conference. Usually such diplomatic exchanges are made via the Swiss, which represent U.S. interests with Iran because of the lack of diplomatic ties.

The letter asked for "humanitarian help" for three Americans she said were unable to return to the United States.

They are missing ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson and a freelance journalist, Iranian-American Roxana Saberi, who was jailed at the end of January in Iran. The third, Esha Momeni, is an Iranian-American student.

Earlier at the meeting, Iran's delegate agreed to help fight drugs trafficking in Afghanistan and also criticized the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan.

"The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective too," Akhoundzadeh said.

PHOTO CAPTION

Iranian soldiers stand guard in Zabol near the border with Afghanistan in 2008.

Agencies