BAGHDAD: The United States insists ambassador-level talks with Iran in Baghdad on Tuesday will focus solely on the situation in Iraq despite rising tensions over American-Iranians detained by Tehran.
"This is an opportunity for direct engagement on issues solely related to Iraq," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington Monday. "We are going to raise the need for Iran to match its actions with its words in seeking strategic stability in Iraq."
McCormack said Iran has not taken any steps to help bring about a stable Iraq, a goal he said Iran professes to share with the United States.
"We'll see, if, as a result of these engagements, they will change their behavior."
The first round of Iran-U.S. talks, May 28 in Baghdad, marked a break in a 27-year diplomatic freeze opened after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran
While Iran said this second round would happen last month, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other U.S officials delayed because Iran had not scaled back what Washington alleges is a concerted effort to arm militants and harm U.S. troops in Iraq.
Tuesday's talks will be held at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry just outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will lead the U.S. side. His counterpart will be Hasan Kazemi Qomi, Iran's envoy to Iraq.
An Iraqi delegation led by a top official will attend the talks, according to Labeed Abawi, a senior official at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. He declined to identify the official.
"What we, as Iraqis, hope to achieve is to build confidence between the two sides," Abawi told The Associated Press. "There are facts on the ground and they need to be dealt with."
The detention of four Iranian-Americans in Iran has deepened tensions between Washington and Tehran, whose relations were sufficiently strained over Iran's controversial nuclear program and its support for radical Muslim groups like Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
But McCormack said Iraq was the only issue on the agenda.
He said he expected Iran to bring up the case of five Iranians held in U.S. custody in Iraq and accused of supporting insurgents. Crocker would not raise U.S. concerns about the four Iranian-Americans held for espionage, he said.
Washington has called for their release and says the charges are false.
"No, this meeting is about Iraq," McCormack said when asked specifically about the case of one of the four, Haleh Esfandiari of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "We've taken lots of opportunities via the Swiss to raise the case of Haleh Esfandiari as well as other American citizens in Iran. That is being handled in a separate channel."
Switzerland looks after U.S. interests in Iran.
Iran has called for the release of the five Iranians, whom the United States has said are the operations chief and members of Iran's elite Quds Force, which is accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Iran says they are diplomats who were legally in Iraq.
But Abawi, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry official, said Baghdad did not want the detentions to dominate the talks "because this will distract from the primary aim and that's helping Iraq."
"We will ask the two nations to help us overcome our problems using all possible means," he told Iraq's independent Asharqiya television.
The fragile government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been pressing for another meeting between the United States and Iran, the two nations with the greatest influence over its own future as well as that of the entire country.
As a possible sign of the high hopes Iraq places on the talks, President Jalal Talabani met separately Monday with Crocker and Qomi.
A statement by Talabani's office said the Kurdish president expressed to Qomi his wish to see Tehran using the close ties it maintains with "some" Iraqi groups to "calm the situation" in Iraq and help its government fight terrorism and restore stability. It did not elaborate.
