DAMASCUS, 13 March 2007 — Syria called for an unrestricted dialogue with Washington yesterday, as a senior US official made the highest-level visit to Damascus in two years for talks limited to the Iraqi refugee crisis.

Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for refugees and migration, discussed the plight of the refugees, who now number about two million among Iraq’s neighbors, including between 600,000 and one million in Syria.

“We told (Sauerbrey) that all the questions are linked in the Arab region and that a comprehensive dialogue is needed on all these questions,” Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Meqdad said after meeting the US official. “We can’t find lasting solutions without such a dialogue,” he warned.

Meqdad said Sauerbrey, who left the meeting with speaking to reporters, had been “positive on the manner in which Syria is managing the question of Iraqi refugees. She referred to all the services that are being offered by Syria.”

The US Embassy gave no program for Sauerbrey’s meetings in Syria and it was unclear if she would hold talks with other officials. She has already been to Egypt and will also visit Jordan.

The US State Department has sought to play down the bilateral nature of her talks, stressing she was being accompanied on the Middle East tour by an envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The director of the UN agency’s International Protection Division, George Okoth-Obbo, arrived in Damascus on Saturday but UNHCR officials said he would not be joining the US envoy in her meetings with Syrian officials.

Sauerbrey is the most senior US official to visit Syria since then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in February 2005.

Her visit comes hot on the heels of State Department colleague David Satterfield sitting down with Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmed Arnus at a Baghdad security conference on Saturday.

The United States had previously refused high-level contacts with Syria, which it accuses of seeking to destabilize Lebanon and conniving with insurgents in neighboring Iraq.