Baghdad  - Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallim arrived in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday, the latest in a series of diplomatic visits to the country following US pledges to withdraw its troops.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki welcomed al-Muallim at the airport ahead of talks on issues of "mutual and regional importance", Syria's official SANA news agency reported Wednesday.

The Syrian foreign minister's visit came a day after Turkish President Abdullah Gul became the first Turkish head of state to visit Iraq in 33 years, and after a flurry of diplomatic activity in the country since the US pledged to withdraw its forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and from Iraq by December 31, 2011.

Al-Muallim last visited Iraq in November 2006 with a mandate to restore diplomatic relations after they were severed in 1982, at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Syria and Iraq at the time agreed to form joint committees to improve communication on security and economic matters.

Relations between the two countries were strained in October 2008 when US forces based in Iraq chased what they said were "foreign fighters" into a Syrian village near the border of Iraq, killing eight people.

More recently, the two countries have cooperated with Turkey on the sharing of water resources in the shared Tigris-Euphrates river basin.

Syria and Iraq are nervous about Turkish plans to build a series of dams along the Euphrates river that will provide Turkey with hydroelectric power and will irrigate more than 1.5 million hectares of land, but could significantly reduce the flow of the Euphrates into Syria and Iraq.

Syrian and Iraqi delegates met on the sidelines of the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul on Saturday and agreed to ask Turkey to increase the amount of water it would pass downstream, SANA reported at the time. (dpa)