Iraqi leaders yesterday wrangled over the shape of a government due to take power from the US occupation authority next month and who should succeed Saddam Hussein as president.
With the top post of prime minister filled and likely accord on key ministries, Iraqi officials spoke of sharp disagreement on the largely ceremonial choice of head of state between Adnan Pachachi, veteran scion of a pre-Saddam political dynasty, and Ghazi Yawar, a youthful engineer long based in Saudi Arabia.
Many of the 23-member Iraqi Governing Council meeting yesterday favored Yawar, said one senior Iraqi politician. But US administrator Paul Bremer and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi were putting the case for Pachachi, a former foreign minister.
Talks were going on after four hours, officials said.
Brahimi and Bremer struggled to strike a balance among Iraq's religious and ethnic groups. Prime minister-designate Iyad Allawi is from the long oppressed Shiite majority. Governing Council members Pachachi and Yawar are, like Saddam, Sunni Arabs.
The non-Arab Kurds had pushed hard for the presidency and would be compensated with two key ministries, defense and foreign affairs, Iraqi politicians involved in the talks said.
Bremer's US-run authority took power after US-led forces toppled Saddam 14 months ago. It intends to hand over formal sovereignty to the interim government on June 30, although some 150,000 foreign troops, mostly American, will stay on in Iraq.
Saddam is in US custody as a prisoner of war; his Iraqi successor may seek to try him for crimes against humanity.
Washington asked the UN to help form the government that will lead Iraq to its first free elections in the new year under a plan that the US has submitted to the UN Security Council for endorsement.
The US-appointed Governing Council caught Brahimi off guard on Friday in announcing its choice of Allawi, a secular Shiite with strong links to the CIA.
Pachachi, 81, was foreign minister in the 1960s, before Saddam came to power. His Baghdad-based family was a powerful force under the British-installed monarchy that fell in 1958. He has spent much of the time since in exile in Abu Dhabi.
Yawar, in his mid-40s, is a leader of a prominent Sunni tribe from the northern city of Mosul. A civil engineer, he left Iraq in 1990 and ran a telecom firm in Saudi Arabia.
Senior members of the Governing Council said after talks on Saturday that the 26 Cabinet posts under Allawi were all but agreed but there was a standoff over the presidency.
Others said negotiations were still open on other jobs too.
On Saturday, senior Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi said the names of key ministers had been agreed.
"The Governing Council, Bremer and Lakhdar Brahimi agreed on the list," he said. "It is not 100 percent certain that the nominees will accept it but it is pretty sure they will."
Chalabi said Hoshiyar Zebari, now foreign minister in the US-supervised government, would be defense minister. Another Kurd, Barham Salih, would take his job at the Foreign Ministry.
The Kurds, who suffered genocidal violence under Saddam, effectively broke free of Baghdad under US protection after the Gulf War of 1991. But Washington and its allies in the region, notably Turkey which has its own big Kurdish population, are now keen to keep the Kurds inside a new, federal Iraq.
Technocrat Thamir Ghadban was nominated as oil minister, said Chalabi, a Shiite relative of Allawi who ran a rival exile opposition party and has fallen out of favour with Washington.
Iraq has the world's second biggest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and rebuilding an industry wrecked by Saddam's wars and sanctions is a priority for restoring prosperity.
Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, was nominated as finance minister, Chalabi said. Sunni Samir Sumaidy would stay on as interior minister and Raja Habib Khuzai, a British-educated Shiite doctor, was nominated to the Health Ministry, he added.
Meanwhile, Shiite fighters clashed with US forces in the holy city of Najaf yesterday, the latest in a series of skirmishes since a truce offer last week by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Militiamen exchanged gunfire with a US tank and blasts from Iraqi rocket-propelled grenades or mortars were heard.
But US commanders say they are optimistic that, over the coming days, the truce will end an uprising by Sadr's Mahdi Army that has cost hundreds of Iraqi lives over the past two months.
The US military announced the deaths of four more soldiers, bring the total combat death toll to at least 588 since the start of the invasion last year.
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