U.S., Iranian officials talk after meeting with Syrians

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt — 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 Moallem.

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

In a final communiqué, 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."

"There was a lot of suspicion, a lot of mistrust," in several directions, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari acknowledged during a news conference. Rice said the reform agenda of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki's government "needs to be pursued urgently and it needs to be pursued to completion." A draft law to divide Iraq's oil revenue among regional groups is now available and it "should be passed with dispatch," she said, along with revision of de-Baathification laws, a constitutional review, dismantling of militias and arrangements for provincial elections.

In the days leading up to the conference, the administration had decided to break the ice here with Syria and Iran in response to appeals from Malaki's government and critics at home. Reluctant to let the gathering pass without a face-to-face exchange between the United States and Iran, Zebari arranged for U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and David Satterfield, Rice's chief coordinator for Iraq at the State Department, and members of the Iranian delegation to literally bump into one another. Crocker later declined to characterize the conversation, which he said lasted about three minutes, but said it was limited to Iraq.