Kerbala, March 19 (Agencies): Hundreds of thousands of Shia pilgrims gathered in the sacred Iraqi city of Kerbala today for a religious event held under tight security as Iran agreed to a proposal to hold talks with the US on stabilising Iraq.

Standing beside Shia and Sunni leaders at a news conference, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, today backed a call by an Iraqi Shia leader for the talks with Iran, which Washington accuses of meddling in Iraqi affairs. “I am one of the people who supports this. The problem of Iraq has become an international one,” said Talabani.

The White House dismissed Iran’s offer as “a stunt” to divert attention from the nuclear programme. The talks were first proposed by the US last year but had been ignored by Tehran until now -- the week in which the UN Security Council is due to discuss the programme.

Sunni Arabs are deeply suspicious of the strong ties between Iran and its fellow Shias leading the Baghdad government.

In Tehran, an Iranian government official said: “We have agreed to start talks with America on Iraq. Particularly on the timetable for departure of occupying forces.”

General George Casey, US commander in Iraq, questioned Iran’s motives. “They’re playing, I think, a very delicate balancing act. On the one hand, they want a stable neighbour. On the other hand I don’t believe they want to see us succeed here.”

Secular former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Iraq was nearing the “point of no return” towards all-out civil war.

Allawi, a Shia appointed under US supervision in 2004 and who oversaw offensives against Shia and Sunni rebels while in power, said such a conflict was already under way.

“We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,” he told BBC.

Arab and Western leaders worry that if Iraq were to crumble, sectarian violence would spread across West Asia with Europe and the US also feeling the impact.

The bombing on February 22 of a major Shia shrine in Samarra touched off a wave of bloody sectarian reprisals.

Wary of any repeat, the Kerbala authorities deployed at least 8,000 Iraqi police and soldiers in the city.

Local officials say they expect as many as two million people to attend the mourn-ing ceremonies tomorrow evening in Kerbala, 110 km southwest of Baghdad.

North of the capital, U.S. troops killed eight people, including a boy and his parents, after their patrol was ambushed in the Sunni town of Duluiya town early on Sunday, Iraqi police said. The U.S. military said troops killed seven“terrorists”. (Additional reporting by David Clarke in London and the Tehran bureau, writing by Michael Georgy)