TEHRAN (Mehr News Agency) -– Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamidreza Asefi said on Sunday that Iran was interested in the participation of the Iraqi foreign minister in the Damascus meeting and considered it as helpful.

“We were interested in the participation of Iraq in this meeting and we think the presence of Iraq in this meeting was useful,” Asefi told reporters in his weekly press briefing.

The Syrian-hosted summit is being attended by the Turkish, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iranian, Kuwait and Saudi ministers.

Asefi said the issue of terrorism and the Iraqi security is a source of concerns for all countries present in the meeting and expressed hope that the meeting would bear good results for Iraq and neighboring states.

On the presence of the neighboring countries’ forces in Iraq he said the deployment of any foreign forces in Iraq should first have the approval of the Iraqi people and a mandate by the United Nations.

The Iraqi interim foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari denied Saturday receiving an offer to attend a meeting of Iraq's neighboring states and Egypt in Damascus, saying any such last-minute offer would anyway "not" be "an invitation".

"I have not received any official invitation, through the recognized channels," Zebari told AFP.

"It seems that some neighboring countries did not want Iraq to participate in the meeting," Zebari said, without elaborating.

Syria initially left Zebari off the guest list because of its continued misgivings about the legitimacy of his U.S.-installed administration.

But at the insistence of Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Damascus agreed Friday night to extend a hasty invitation to Baghdad, said foreign ministry spokeswoman Boushra Kanafani.

The past week has seen the worst bloodshed since U.S. troops entered Baghdad in April, with a wave of car-bombings in the Iraqi capital prompting a host of foreign missions to withdraw or downscale their staff, undermining the post-war reconstruction effort.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher hit out at the Iraqi Governing Council on Sunday for refusing to attend the Damascus meeting to discuss the war-torn country's growing instability.

"We haven't heard from the Iraqi foreign minister except on television where he came up with some allegations that are wrong," Maher told AFP here.

"I don't think that when you receive an invitation you answer on television," he said.

Egypt's top diplomat said the group decided "unanimously" on "adding Iraq, the new country, to the group" of Syrian, Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian, Jordanian, Saudi and Kuwaiti foreign ministers. MS/MS MNA End