Baghdad Arab Summit Postponed until March 2012

An Arab summit that had been due to be held in Baghdad next week has been postponed until March 2012, the Arab League chief and Iraq's foreign minister said Thursday, after Gulf calls for a cancelation.

"It has been decided to postpone the Baghdad summit until March 2012 at the request of the Republic of Iraq which will retain the right to host the (next) summit," said a statement released by the 22-nation bloc after talks between its secretary general Amr Moussa and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

The decision "takes account of current events in several Arab countries," the statement added.

Iraq has spent some 450 million dollars preparing to host its first regular Arab summit since 1978 as it seeks to reassert its diplomatic position in the region. It hosted an extraordinary summit in 1990.

The gathering had already been postponed once from March as it fell increasingly foul of the wave of unrest that has swept the Arab world this year, toppling longstanding regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and stoking tensions between mainly Shiite Iraq and Sunni-ruled Gulf states.

In April, Bahrain said that Gulf Arab states wanted the Baghdad summit canceled altogether after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki charged the crushing of Shiite-led protests in the Sunni-ruled kingdom was stoking sectarian tensions in the region.