BAGHDAD, 21 November 2006 — Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki told the Syrian foreign minister yesterday that he was not prepared to let Iraq become a proxy battleground for Syria’s differences with the United States.

“If Syria or any other state has differences with the United States, it’s their own business,” Maliki said. “It should settle these differences, but not at our cost,” the premier told a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, the first Syrian official to visit Iraq since the US-led invasion of 2003.

Maliki said Iraq aimed to improve relations with Syria, but “this requires a strong desire from both the brother countries.”

Syria should be “more understanding toward us,” he said, adding: “What goes on in Iraq is a threat for everybody. The interest of Syria is to contribute in the stability of Iraq.”

Muallem denied Syria wanted to see instability grip its eastern neighbor. “Danger to Iraq is danger for the entire region,” he said, “We want to increase coordination in security and political fields with Iraq. We want to be a partner in the benefits and in the losses.”

US authorities have regularly accused Syria of not doing enough to prevent Sunni Arab insurgents smuggling men and materiel across its border with Iraq.

Coalition spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said yesterday that up to 70 foreign fighters a month were slipping across the border from Syria.

But Muallem denied that his landmark visit was an attempt to “appease the United States.” “I am not a mediator of the United States in the region and there is no dialogue between Syria and the United States,” he told an earlier news conference.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, meanwhile, will fly to Iran this weekend for talks with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aides said yesterday amid talk of a shift in US policy toward Iranian engagement in Iraq.

“The president will go to Iran this weekend and meet the Iranian president. The two will discuss a range of issues including the current situation in Iraq,” a source close to the president said.

Two Shiite ministers escaped assassination bids yesterday as insurgents set their sights on Iraq’s beleaguered government, still struggling to curb the raging bloodshed.

A Shiite deputy health minister, Hakim Al-Zamili, said he escaped an assassination bid in which gunmen killed two of his bodyguards. Fellow Shiite Deputy Health Minister Ammar Al-Assafar was kidnapped on Sunday by gunmen dressed in security uniforms from his home in Baghdad’s mainly Sunni district of Adhamiyah.

Minister without portfolio Mohammed Abbas Al-Oraibi was the second Shiite official to survive an assassination attempt yesterday.

He was returning to Baghdad from the southern city of Amara when his convoy was struck by a roadside bomb on the outskirts of the capital, one of his aides said.

On Sunday, the Syrian foreign minister said the key reason for the bloodshed was the presence of US-led troops, who have been in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

At least 16 people were killed in attacks on the ground yesterday, six of them in the flash point province of Diyala north of the capital.

Among them was the popular satirist and broadcaster Walid Hassan, whose weekly show “Caricature” on Iraq’s Al-Sharqiya channel poked fun at the sectarian politics gripping the country.

On the southern outskirts of Baghdad, police found 14 bodies believed to be those of Sunni Arabs kidnapped, tortured and executed in retaliation for a bombing in a Shiite neighborhood Sunday, a security source said.

Police and troops were still hunting for an Austrian and four US security guards kidnapped by militiamen disguised as policemen near the Kuwaiti border on Thursday, the British military said.

But Higher Education Minister Abed Dhiab Al-Ujaili said he was resuming his Cabinet duties after stopping work in protest at a mass abduction of ministry staff last week. Armed men dressed in police uniforms kidnapped up to 150 staff and visitors from the ministry’s scientific research institute in broad daylight.