By Xinhua,
Baghdad : British Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrived in Baghdad on Saturday morning to meet top Iraqi leaders, Iraqi official television reported.
A statement by the Iraqi government said earlier that Brown will meet his counterpart Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders to discuss bilateral relations along with studying “the future of the British troops presence in Iraq’s southern city of Basra.
Saturday’s visit is the third for Brown since taking over from Tony Blair as prime minister on June 27, last year.
Britain currently has some 4,000 troops in southern Iraq, mostly based near the city of Basra, some 550 km south of Baghdad.
The visit comes two days after Maliki and U.S. President George W. Bush stressed in a phone conversation the importance of achieving a timetable to hand over security control to the Iraqi security troops so as to lay the ground for the pullout of the U.S. forces.