Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is to fly to Iran this weekend for talks with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aides said on Monday, as bombers and death squads claimed another 78 lives across 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.
An MP for the main bloc which leads the government confirmed that Talabani was scheduled to travel to Iran on Saturday.
"He is going to Iran because he was invited a long time ago by the Iranian president himself," Bassem Sharif said, referring to reports in the Iranian official media earlier this month of an impending visit.
Sharif added that there was a possibility that President Bashar al-Assad of Iran's regional ally Syria might join the Tehran talks, following a landmark visit to Baghdad this week by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem.
But Talabani's spokesman Hiwa Othman denied that such a summit was in the pipeline.
"There is no such three-way summit in Tehran and our president is looking forward to meet his Syrian counterpart in Damascus at some point of time," Othman told AFP.
But other government officials said that the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iraq and Syria, broken off more than a quarter of a century ago, was in the offing and that an announcement might be made before Muallem wraps up his visit Tuesday.
The ousted regime of Saddam Hussein broke off diplomatic relations with Syria in 1980 in protest at its support for Iran in its eight-year war with Iraq that broke out that year.
The talk of a meeting between Talabani and his Iranian and Syrian counterparts comes amid growing pressure on the US administration to review its cold shouldering of the two Iraqi neighbours.
Washington expressed scepticism Monday that the weekend talks would lead to progress on the ground.
State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said senior Iraqi and Iranian officials had met in the past, "and we haven't seen much by way of follow-up on it. The problem is not what they say, the problem is what they do," he said.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told Muallem that Iraq would not be a proxy battleground for Syria and the United States to settle their differences.
"If Syria or any other state has differences with the United States, it's their own business," Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with Muallem, the first Syrian minister to visit Baghdad since the US-led invasion of 2003.
"It should settle these differences, but not at our cost."
Muallem denied Syria wanted to see instability grip its eastern neighbour.
"Danger to Iraq is danger for the entire region," he said.
Muallem's visit comes amid US charges that Syria has failed to prevent militants from crossing the border into Iraq to fuel the insurgency.
US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said that up to 70 foreign fighters were entering Iraq by crossing the Syrian border and 20 percent of those fighters captured in Iraq were Syrians.
On Sunday, Iraqi authorities announced that a suicide bomber who attacked building labourers in the city of Hilla just south of the capital and killed 22 people was a Syrian.
The violence continued unabated Monday with insurgents setting their sights on Iraq's beleaguered government.
Deputy health minister, Hakim al-Zamili, said he escaped an assassination bid in which gunmen killed two of his bodyguards.
Mohammed Abbas al-Oraibi, a minister without portfolio, emerged unscathed from a roadside bombing against his convoy on the outskirts of the capital, one of his aides told AFP.
In other violence on Monday, 78 people were killed or found murdered, officials said.
Police said they found 60 bodies in and around Baghdad of men kidnapped, tortured and killed execution style in apparent sectarian attacks.
In rebel attacks at least 16 others were killed in shootings and bombings, including 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.
Two more US servicemen died in Iraq, the military said, taking its losses since the invasion to 2,861, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.