Iranian Detainees In Iraq Get Visit

Iranian diplomats said they made their first visit Saturday to five Iranians that U.S. authorities are holding in Iraq on suspicion that they were training militants there.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said he hoped the visit to the detainees, who have been held since January, would help ease tensions between Iran and the United States.

Iran's ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, told Iran's Arabic language Al-Alam channel he and his staff met with the Iranians for five hours at their detention facility and their "morale was high." He repeated Tehran's demands that they be immediately released.

The detention of the five Iranians by U.S. troops on Jan. 11 in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil has been a point of contention between Tehran and Washington at a time when the Iraqi government is trying to get the two to resolve their differences.

U.S. authorities have said the five included the operations chief and other members of Iran's elite Quds Force, which is accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Iran denies the claim and insists the five are diplomats in Iraq with permission of the government.

"The presence of the diplomats in Iraq is legal and this detention should have not took place," Qomi said, according to an Arabic translation of his comments.

A U.S. military spokesman could not immediately confirm the visit. The Iranian Embassy could not be reached for comment.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari expressed appreciation to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. military for helping organize the visit.

"We hope that this humanitarian gesture will help to ease tensions and facilitate further dialogue between the two countries," he said, according to a ministry statement.

Qomi told Al-Alam that Iran believed two other Iranians — bank employees — were also in U.S. custody and was trying to get access to them. There has been no U.S. confirmation of other Iranians being held.

The visit came a week after Iran said it would consider "with a positive point of view" an Iraqi request for a new round of Iranian-American talks, but only after the U.S. responds to the invitation.

The Iraqi government, which is backed by the U.S. but closely allied to Iran, has been trying to get the two sides together, hoping some cooperation will reduce violence in the country.

The U.S. and Iran held groundbreaking ambassador-level discussions on May 28 in Baghdad to address security in Iraq.

But since then, bitterness has mounted further between them, partly due to Tehran's detention of four Iranian-American scholars and activists charged with endangering national security. The U.S. has demanded their release, saying the charges against them are false.