Iran to Take Part in Iraq Security Conference

BAGHDAD, Feb. 28 — The top Iranian national security official, Ali Larijani, indicated Wednesday that Iranian officials would probably take part in a regional security conference on Iraq next month, which would include the first high-level diplomatic contacts between American and Iranian officials in more than two years.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, set a date on Wednesday for the conference: it is to be held March 10 in Baghdad. The agenda will be how to rescue Iraq from a civil war that claimed at least two dozen more lives.

In the deadliest attack on Wednesday, a car-bomb explosion ripped through a marketplace in the Bayaa district of southwest Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 27 others, according to officials from the interior ministry and Yarmouk Hospital. In central Baghdad, two Iraqi policemen died when a suicide bomber struck the entrance to the Bab al-Sheik police station.

Iran to Take Part in Iraq Security Conference