Still No New Government in Iraq as Talks Postponed

Talks between the Shiite and Kurdish blocs that won the most votes in Iraq’s election stalled Sunday, dimming their hopes of forming a new government before Wednesday’s debut session of the national assembly.

A scheduled meeting Sunday between the Shiite Muslim-dominated United Iraqi Alliance and a coalition of Kurdish parties was postponed when the Kurds delayed their reply to a proposed power-sharing deal. One Kurdish official said his bloc would seek to revise it and expand the negotiations to include other political parties.

Participants in the talks gave varying interpretations of the delay, with one usually optimistic Shiite aide saying the effort had “stumbled” over some of the most contentious issues facing Iraq. One Kurdish official said the negotiations had “hit a dead end,” while another said a deal could be near.

Jawad Maliki, a leader of the Islamic Dawa Party in the Shiite bloc, said the talks could resume as early as today. He said the two blocs would continue their effort after the national assembly convened if there was still no agreement on the shape and mandate of a government to replace the U.S.-appointed interim Iraqi leadership.

Iraqis, who risked threatened violence to vote by the millions Jan. 30, have grown impatient with the political wrangling and more fearful for their lives as insurgents resisting the U.S. military occupation exploit a security vacuum. The insurgents killed at least 18 Iraqis, a U.S. soldier and two American security contractors in scattered weekend violence.

If the Shiite and Kurdish alliances can reach an agreement, they will have enough seats for the two-thirds vote in the assembly that is required to form Iraq’s first democratically elected government in half a century. That government, led by a prime minister, would rule until the assembly rewrites the constitution and calls new elections as early as the fall.

The Shiite alliance won a bare majority of the legislature’s 275 seats and has nominated Ibrahim Jafari, the head of the Islamic Dawa Party, as prime minister. The Kurds, who would be the minority party in the government, want to put one of their leaders, Jalal Talabani, in the more ceremonial post of president and to control two of the five most powerful Cabinet ministries.

Negotiators for the two blocs last week produced a vaguely worded power-sharing accord that left key details unsettled and sent it to their leaders for review. But when Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Shiite alliance, traveled Friday to hear the reaction of top Kurdish officials, he came away fearful that the talks were breaking down, an aide said.

Still unsettled, officials in both blocs say, are a division of Cabinet posts, the degree of autonomy for Iraq’s three predominantly Kurdish provinces in the north, and the boundaries of the Kurdish region, home to 3 million of Iraq’s 25 million people.

The Kurds want the region’s boundaries redrawn to include parts of oil-rich Kirkuk province, but the Shiites insist on leaving that decision to a constitutional government. The Shiites say they are also resisting a demand that would require the army to get permission from Kurdish leaders before entering their region.

“We told them that this is against federal law anywhere in the world,” said Maliki, the Islamic Dawa Party negotiator.

Underlying the differences, although not a direct issue in the talks, is the distaste among many Kurds, who are Sunni Muslims, for Jafari’s conservative brand of Islam and his stated goal of closer relations with Iran. In interviews Sunday, ordinary Kurds said they feared a centralized, overbearing religious state under Jafari.

“We do not want the Iranian experience in Iraq,” said Jaiman Ali Abed Haq, 27, a resident of Irbil in the Kurdish north.

Fuad Massum, a Kurdish negotiator, told Agence France-Presse that the Kurds were demanding changes in the tentative power-sharing accord and wanted to bring other parties into the negotiations, a step that could prolong the talks for days, if not weeks.

A senior Kurdish official in Baghdad said he was alarmed by the prospect that the national assembly could meet in the absence of a power-sharing deal and launch a freewheeling debate on how to form a government. Sensitive issues being hashed out behind closed doors, he said, would end up on the assembly floor, with politicians pandering to cameras.

The struggle for power, he added, would turn into “a show.” What Iraq needs instead from the election’s winners, the official said, is a public display of unity and stability to counter the insurgency.

The insurgency is led by Sunni Muslims, whose sect is a minority in Iraq but wielded power under former President Saddam Hussein, who is now in prison. After two suicide bombings killed nearly 200 people in the last two weeks, insurgent violence continued at a lower level Saturday and Sunday.

In the northern city of Mosul, a gunman shot and killed three Iraqi police officers Saturday as they drove to the funeral of a co-worker’s wife and two children who had died in a roadside bomb attack a day earlier. A U.S. soldier was gunned down in an insurgent attack in the same city that day.

In fighting there Sunday, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed five insurgents in street clashes, the U.S. command said. Associated Press quoted a hospital official as saying a woman and two children died in a separate incident in Mosul when a U.S. helicopter gunship fired at insurgents, destroying three cars.

In nearby Shargat, a suicide bomber detonated his car outside the police chief’s home Saturday, killing at least four people.

Two American security contractors died Saturday when a roadside bomb tore into their black Chevrolet Suburban, the last of four vehicles in a convoy headed south from Baghdad to the city of Hillah.

Times staff writers Said Rifai and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad and a special correspondent in Irbil contributed to this report.