BAGHDAD - Envoys of the United States and Iran will hold a second round of talks in Baghdad on Tuesday on the security situation in Iraq, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.
"The meeting is a follow up to the first meeting in May and will be held in Baghdad on Tuesday," Zebari told AFP late Sunday.
Iranian and US delegations met in Baghdad on May 28 for their highest-level official talks in 27 years.
Iran on Wednesday announced that the United States had put in an official request for a second round of talks over Iraq's security situation, the ISNA news agency said.
"The Americans have made their request for talks. God willing, these talks will take place in the near future," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted by ISNA as saying.
"Soon, the second round of talks will be held at the level of ambassador," he added.
The May 28 encounter between US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Iranian ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi in Baghdad did not achieve any major breakthrough and was strictly limited to the security situation in Iraq.
Both sides stuck to their familiar positions, with Tehran calling for US troops to be pulled out and Washington accusing Iran of stoking the insurgency that is bedeviling Iraq.
But for many observers, the sheer fact that the two foes sat down at the same table was remarkable.
The United States broke off relations with Iran in 1980 after Islamic revolutionaries seized the US embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days.
The two countries remain at loggerheads over a range of issues including Iran's nuclear programme, which the United States claims is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, an accusation fiercely denied by Tehran.
US forces have frequently accused Iran of stoking the violence in Iraq by arming and training militias, allegations that are also denied by Tehran.
Relations have been chilled further by the detention in Iraq by US forces of at least five Iranian officials who Tehran insists are diplomats, but Washington says are members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
Strains have also come from the detention by Tehran of three US-Iranians accused of espionage and harming national security by being linked to alleged US efforts to topple Iran's clerical authorities.
The US military levied fresh charges against Tehran on Sunday, saying that extremist groups were smuggling arms into Iraq through Iran.
"We have seen ordnance and weapons that come from other places, but we assess that they have come through Iran," US military spokesman Admiral Mark Fox told reporters.
Fox also alleged Iranian agents continue to smuggle Iranian made armour piercing bombs -- explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs) -- to Iraqi extremist groups across the country's long border.
"We do feel that there are networks of EFPs that are coming from Iran," he said, adding the troops had detained two suspects believed to be linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' covert Qods Force.
Since May 2004, when the EFPs emerged on the Iraqi battlefield, more than 200 US soldiers have been killed by these bombs which fire a fist-sized chunk of molten metal that can cut through even a heavily armoured vehicle.
Tehran denies being behind any weapons smuggling, but Fox insisted that weapons seized by Iraqi and US forces are clearly of Iranian manufacture.
And recently the military accused the Qods Force of supporting a brazen attack on US troops in the central shrine city of Karbala in January in which five American soldiers were killed.

07/22/2007 20:09 GMT