Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will visit Afghanistan, the Mehr news agency reported Sunday.

Ahmadinejad will start the one-day visit on Monday and confer with his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai on bilateral and international issues, the report said.

Afghanistan is one of the few countries where Iran and its arch-foe the United States have common interests, and common enemies such as the Taliban Islamists. Both sides also support the government of Karzai.

The Iranian president has often said the dilemma in Afghanistan could not be solved by military means.

Ahmadinejad said that instead of waging war, the West should have invested a very small part of its military budgets to create jobs for the 25 million people in Afghanistan.

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has postponed a trip to Afghanistan devoted to providing “solutions for settling the problems” in Iran’s eastern neighbor.

The one-day visit, originally scheduled for Monday, would be the President’s first visit to Afghanistan since both he and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai were re-elected last year.

“President Ahmadinejad won’t be coming to Kabul,” an informed source at the Karzai’s office told on condition of anonymity.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has, however, arrived in Afghanistan on Monday morning on an unannounced visit.

Iran blames Afghanistan’s insurgency and the rising Taliban-linked extremism on the West’s interference in the war-torn country.

The US-led war in Afghanistan has killed more than 1,440 civilians this year – a figure almost equal to the US-led coalition’s overall death toll in over eight years of hostilities.

Meanwhile, according to figures released by the Washington Post, around 5,372 American servicemen have been killed since 2001 in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad says Turkey’s global stature has gained prominence due to the wise policies its leader and officials have adopted.

Such policies, said the President in a phone dialogue with his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul, has placed Turkey in a position of playing a “very effective role in regional stability and security.”

“Of course,” he said, “The intelligent people of Turkey also appreciate such policies and support their leader’s constructive plans.”

Ahmadinejad also said that regional and global development are changing in favor of Iran and Turkey, creating an excellent opportunity for Tehran and Ankara to push harder for the establishment of peace and justice at a global level.

The Turkish president, for his part, urged continued negotiations and collaborations between the two nations, saying that it could benefit both regional and international peace and stability.

The two presidents also pledged to support each other’s rights in various international stages.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Zionist regime of Israel a “racist group”, blaming all wars and crimes on Zionists.

The conference was attended by Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal, the Secretary General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and officials of the other Palestinian groups.

Ahmadinejad also cautioned that the Zionist regime is seeking hegemony over the world, and added, “It is a well-known fact today that the Zionist regime’s mission is occupation, threat, violence, war mongering and paving the ground for oppressors’ hegemony.”

Stressing that the Zionist regime was created by the arrogant powers to serve as a base in this sensitive region, the Iranian president stated, “Zionists do not adhere to any religion. Furthermore they are against the prophets.”

He also lambasted the claims made by the supporters of the Zionist regime about defending human rights, and added that supporters of the Zionist regime who are shouting slogans for human rights and anti-terrorism, support organized crimes of the occupying regime.

He also underscored that resistance is the only way to confront the Zionists.

About a dozen worms joined a rat and two turtles in a research capsule aboard a Kavoshgar-3 satellite-carrying rocket launched this morning as part of an ambitious Iranian space programme that has worried Western experts who fear the same technology could be used to deliver atomic warheads.

State television showed footage of the rocket being fired from a desert launchpad. A few minutes later the grainy images showed the capsule detaching from the rocket and spinning off into orbit – although there were no details of its fate after that. The station reported that the rocket had “the ability to send back empirical data”.

State television also carried pictures of Mr Ahmadinejad unveiling another home-built rocket dubbed the Simorgh (phoenix). The milk-bottle shaped rocket, emblazoned in blue with the words “Satellite Carrier Simorgh”, is equipped to carry a 100kg (220lb) satellite 500km (310 miles) into orbit.

At the ceremony, at which he also unveiled three home-built satellites, Mr Ahmadinejad hailed the progress Iran was making in its space programme and said that it was only through science that it could “break the global domineering system”.

“It is a great job that living organisms can be sent into space – we do experiments on them and they return to Earth,” the President said. “We are going to send a satellite 500km up.