New York Times reported that Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, delivered a strongly worded demand to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other Iranian officials here on Monday to halt the shelling of a mountainous border region in Iraq’s north, where Mr. Zebari said the bombardment has driven as many as 3,000 Kurdish villagers from their homes and set orchards and fields ablaze.

Mr. Zebari said the shelling of the villages was indiscriminate, and he made clear that Iraqi patience was wearing thin with the bombardment, which has taken place intermittently for about two weeks.

Mr. Zebari words were likely to be sobering against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests in Tehran on Monday by The New York Times for comment on the bombardments.

The Iraqi ambassador to Iran, Mohammad Majid al-Sheikh, said Monday that Iran had ignored an official letter of protest about the shelling.