TEHRAN - Deputy chairman of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said on Saturday that Iran should not hold talks with U.S. on Iraq unless it frees the Iranian diplomats and a provincial official unconditionally.

“If Americans want talks with us why they do not accept an immediate release of five Iranian diplomats and a businessman who had been kidnapped by their troops in Iraq as a precondition to continue talks,” Mohammad-Nabi Rudaki told the Mehr News Agency.
On January 11 U.S. troops stormed the Iranian consulate in Irbil, northern Iraq, and arrested five diplomats. In a similar raid on September 20 the U.S. forces detained Farhadi, the director of cross border commercial transactions at Kermanshah province, at a hotel in Sulaimaniyah in northern Iraq. He was part of a delegation invited by the Sulaimaniyah governor.
Mohammad-Nabi Rudaki also asked if the U.S. wants Iran to help establish peace and security in Iraq why it has accused Iran of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs, and why it has declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization after holding two rounds of negotiations.
He also sharply criticized the U.S. Senate’s decision to divide Iraq into 3 federal regions for Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish communities and described it as a measure to cover up the occupiers’ inability to stem the flow of terror acts in Iraq.
The U.S. administration should review its policies toward Tehran if it is seeking negotiations with Iran on the Iraqi security situation, Rudaki reiterated.