Our Security Hinges on Our Neighbour Says Syrian Minister

Syria's security is intimately linked with that of Iraq, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid Moallem, said last night after arriving in Baghdad on the first visit by a senior minister from Damascus since the US-led invasion three years ago.

Mr Moallem said a timetable for an American troop withdrawal from Iraq would reduce the violence in the region.

His message of shared security was a rejection of Bush administration charges that Syria is supporting terrorists and meddling in Iraq. It anticipated the change of course expected from the Washington study group led by James Baker, which is likely to call for the US to sit down with Iraq's neighbours to stop the chaos.

"We are exerting all our efforts and understand that Iraq's security is part of our security. We will cooperate and we have specific ideas to discuss with the brothers in Iraq in order to set up this cooperation," Mr Moallem said. Denouncing Iraq's sectarian fighting, he said: "We call on you to cling to your unity."

Diplomatic relations with Iraq were broken in 1982 when Syria took Iran's side in the war launched by Saddam Hussein.

In spite of its hostility to Saddam, Syria denounced the US-led invasion of Iraq as illegal - a charge that created a rift with the new Iraqi government until yesterday.

Iraq already has close links with Iran, so the opening with Syria means it now has normal contacts with all its neighbours, even though Washington and Tehran are not on speaking terms.

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who has been advising Mr Bush, added his voice yesterday to calls for a conference with Iraq's neighbours over stability. The five permanent members of the UN security council and regional powers such as India and Pakistan should also attend, he told the BBC. The process should include Iran, with which the US must enter into dialogue, he said.

Mr Kissinger argued that Iraq would not reach stability, let alone democracy, before domestic pressure forced a US troop pull-out. But a withdrawal "without any international understanding and without any even partial solution of some of the problems" would produce a civil war to dwarf the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia.

In Baghdad yesterday Ammar al-Saffar, the deputy health minister and a member of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party, was abducted by gunmen in police uniforms. A day earlier Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Dawa ally, was shot dead with his wife in west Baghdad.

At least 112 people were killed or found dead in the country yesterday. A suicide bomber in the city of Hillah south of Baghdad lured men to his minivan promising work, then blew it up, killing at least 22 and wounding 44, police said.

Three bombs exploded near a bus station in Mashtal in south-east Baghdad, killing 11 and wounding 51. At least 23 others were killed across the country and 56 bodies, some tortured, were found dumped in three cities, 45 of them in Baghdad alone.