Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, criticised his country’s Arab neighbours on Tuesday for failing to open representative offices in Baghdad, calling on them to help secure their borders against insurgent infiltrators and to forgive their share of Iraq’s $75bn foreign debt.

An Iraqi government spokesman also formally called on Gulf states to waive at least part of the damages incurred by the deposed Saddam Hussein regime’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.