Iran spurns US overture to fight Islamic State

Iran's supreme leader said today he had personally rejected an offer from the United States for talks to fight Islamic State, an apparent blow to Washington's efforts to build a military coalition to fight militants in both Iraq and Syria.

World powers meeting in Paris today gave public backing to military action to fight Islamic State fighters in Iraq. France sent jets on a reconnaissance mission to Iraq, a step towards becoming the first ally to join the US-led air campaign there.

But Iran, the principal ally of Islamic State’s main foes in both Iraq and Syria, was not invited to the Paris meeting. The countries that did attend - while supporting action in Iraq - made no mention at all of Syria, where US diplomats face a far tougher task building an alliance for action.

Washington has been trying to build a coalition to fight Islamic State since last week when president Barack Obama pledged to destroy the militant group on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border.

That means plunging into two civil wars in which nearly every country in the Middle East already has a stake. And it also puts Washington on the same side as Tehran, its bitter enemy since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

In a rare direct intervention into diplomacy, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Washington had reached out through the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, requesting a meeting to discuss co-operation against Islamic State.

Khamenei said that some Iranian officials had welcomed the contacts, but he had personally vetoed them.

“I saw no point in co-operating with a country whose hands are dirty and intentions murky,” the Iranian leader said in quotes carried on state news agency IRNA. He accused Washington of “lying” by saying it had excluded Iran from its coalition, saying it was Iran that had refused to participate.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington was "not co-operating with Iran", but declined to be drawn on whether it had reached out through the embassy in Baghdad for talks.

“I am not going to get into a back and forth,” he said. “I don’t think that’s constructive, frankly.”

Islamic State fighters set off alarms across the Middle East since June when they swept across northern Iraq, seizing cities, slaughtering prisoners, proclaiming a caliphate to rule over all Muslims and ordering non-Sunnis to convert or die.

IS fighters, known for beheading their enemies or captives, raised the stakes for the West by cutting off the heads of two Americans and a Briton in videos posted on the Internet which showed the prisoners bound in orange jumpsuits.

French officials said they had hoped to invite Iran to today’s conference but Arab countries had blocked the move.

“We wanted a consensus among countries over Iran’s attendance, but in the end it was more important to have certain Arab states than Iran,” a French diplomat said.

Calling the decision regrettable, Iraq’s foreign minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Baghdad had wanted Iran to attend.

Iran sponsors the governments of both Iraq and Syria and has been at the centre of defences against Islamic State in both countries. The United States reached out to Iran last year when secret talks led to a preliminary deal on nuclear issues.

Iran has occasionally played down its conflicts with the West since President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, was elected last year. Khamenei’s intervention, including his statement that some Iranian officials welcomed the US overture, was a rare public acknowledgment of division but also a reminder that powerful interests in Iran oppose a wider thaw.

At today’s international conference in Paris, the five UN Security Council permanent members, Turkey, European and Arab states and representatives of the EU, Arab League and United Nations all pledged to help Baghdad fight Islamic State.

“All participants underscored the urgent need to remove Daesh from the regions in which it has established itself in Iraq,” said a statement after the talks. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the group which now calls itself Islamic State.

“To that end, they committed to supporting the new Iraqi Government in its fight against Daesh, by any means necessary, including appropriate military assistance....” it said.

Agencies