Syria accepted on Sunday a U.S. invitation to a peace conference in Annapolis, Md. due this week.

Deputy foreign minister Faysal Moqdad was named as head of the delegation to attend Tuesday’s talks, L. A. Times reports.

A Syrian official said that the country decided to attend the talks after it had the confirmation that the disputed Golan Heights would be on the agenda. Golan Heights was seized by Israel in 1967, in the Arab-Israeli war.

The official said: "We received what we have asked for, which is the schedule, and on it is the Syrian-Israeli track. Based on that, we decided to go."

Other fifteen Arab states and dozens more countries plan to send representatives to the Tuesday talks that are meant to be a launching pad for future dialogue in order to resolve the conflict between the Israeli and Palestinians, which is viewed as a source of radicalism in the Middle East.

The decision made by Syria to attend the talks will please many U.S. and Israeli officials, but it will surely upset Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today: "They [the U.S. and Israel] intend to deceive a bunch of people who are like themselves in a watery conference and make them give concessions to the criminal Zionists."

Syria could have dismissed Iran because the U.S. met its condition of including on the agenda the Golan Heights issue.

Sending Moqdad could be a concession to Iran, instead of sending Foreign Minister Walid Moallem. Still, Moqdad is relatively well seen in the Damascus political elite.

According to the official in Damascus, Emad Mustapha, Syria's well-connected envoy to Washington, will also attend the conference.

Today Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a joint statement saying that conferences like this one "are destined to failure even before they start.”