Ali Akbar Salehi, arrives at Baghdad Airport (AP)
Iran's acting Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi met Thursday with top clerics in Najaf, Iraq's religious heartland, pledging support for the new government and non-intervention in its affairs.
"I came carrying a letter from the Iranian leadership to the religious authorities in Najaf," Salehi told a news conference in the central Iraq Shiite shrine city.
"I had a good meeting with (Iraq's top Shiite cleric) Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and I also just finished a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Said al-Hakim," Salehi said.
"And I will meet Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi, and Grand Ayatollah Ishaq al-Fayad in order to give them the message from the Islamic republic," he said, referring to other senior Shiite clerics.
The message "said that the Islamic republic supports the new Iraqi government, and will build relations with Iraq based on non-intervention in its internal affairs, and according to the interests between the two countries," Salehi said.
"We support security, services and rebuilding in Iraq, and we will stand by Iraq until it gets over this distress," he added.
The United States has in the past accused Iran of backing various militias within Iraq.
A US diplomatic cable published by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks in November said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force was "active in Iraq, conducting traditional espionage and supporting violent extremists as well as supporting both legitimate and malign Iranian economic and cultural outreach."
Salehi, who arrived in Iraq on Wednesday and met with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, did not indicate if he planned while in Najaf to meet with radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who returned to the city on Wednesday after four years of self-imposed exile abroad. It is Salehi's second trip abroad since taking taking over the foreign minister post.
His appointment, which is yet to be ratified by the Iranian parliament, came after Ahmadinejad sacked his predecessor Manouchehr Mottaki.
Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s which left almost a million people dead on both sides.
Ties between predominantly Shiite Iran and Shiite-majority Iraq have warmed considerably since the overthrow of Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime in a US-led invasion in 2003.
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