TEHRAN/BAGHDAD, 28 November 2006 — Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said he was seeking Iran’s “comprehensive” help to stabilize Iraq as he started talks with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran yesterday.

Talabani arrived for talks in Iran amid growing calls for Washington to engage Tehran in dialogue to help stop Iraq sliding into civil war. Talabani’s trip had been delayed because of a curfew imposed on Baghdad following a bomb attack on Thursday that killed 200 Shiite Muslims. The curfew was lifted yesterday.

An Iranian official earlier told Reuters Talabani would go straight into talks with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after arriving and would leave today after talks with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority.

Asked last week what his talks in Tehran would cover, Talabani told Iranian state television: “Strengthening relations and Iraq’s security.” He said then he would be accompanied by Iraq’s oil, industry and technology ministers, and probably Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari. The visit is the latest of a series of contacts. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki visited Tehran in September and secured a pledge of support for his government from Tehran.

Iran’s outspokenly anti-American president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Sunday Iran was ready to help the United States in Iraq but only if it pledged to pull its troops out.

Meanwhile, an F-16 fighter on a combat mission near Baghdad crashed yesterday, and the pilot appeared to have died after ejecting. A local journalist who shot film of the wreckage of the plane after it came down north of Fallujah in Iraq’s western Anbar province said he was in no doubt the pilot was dead. The US military confirmed the crash but said it had no information on the fate of the pilot or the cause of the crash.

The film showed the bloodied and motionless body of what appeared to be a man in a flight suit wearing a parachute harness lying in a field strewn with the wreckage of the plane.

Baghdad authorities yesterday lifted a three-day curfew imposed on the city after the worst bombing since the US invasion in 2003, but nerves were frayed on fears of a new wave of blood-letting. As the curfew was lifted, people rushed to stock up on food as rumors swirled that the capital was about to be locked down again. Maliki’s office denied any such plans.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni Arab party, said tens of people were killed in Sunni areas during the curfew by gunmen in uniforms, but there was no independent confirmation. Meanwhile, Britain expects to be able to withdraw “thousands” of its troops from Iraq by the end of 2007, Britain’s Defense Minister Des Browne said yesterday.

Browne refused to give specific numbers, but said: “By the end of next year I expect numbers for British forces in Iraq to be significantly lower by a matter of thousands.”

Also the last Italian troops will leave Iraq by the end of the week, after handing over their base in the south of the country to Iraqi forces, Prime Minister Romano Prodi said yesterday.