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BAGHDAD (Reuters), Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani
said on Friday the Kurds had not decided who to
back, as negotiations over the formation of the
government looked set to be protracted.
There is no time limit for naming the top positions
-- a president and two vice-presidents, who must
then decide on the prime minister. Western
diplomatic sources believe it could take weeks to
form a government.
Barzani, head of one of the two main parties in the
Kurdish coalition, said the Kurds would seek key
posts.
He was diplomatic but firm on the issue of Kirkuk,
Iraq's most ethnically diverse and hotly contested
city.
Kirkuk, 250 km north of Baghdad, sits near 6 percent
of the world's known oil reserves and is split among
Kurds, Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkmen.
"In the future we want Kirkuk to be an example of
ethnic, religious and national coexistence. But this
is after Kirkuk's identity is fixed as (part of)
Kurdistan," he said.
Thousands of Iraqi Kurds were pushed out of their
homes by Saddam Hussein when he sought to move Arabs
into Kirkuk and the surrounding area to increase his
influence. The Kurds have repeatedly said they want
the areas back.
SECURITY
Shi'ite leaders have said Sunnis will play a role in
Iraq's new political landscape despite their
election turnout.
Whoever becomes prime minister is likely to make the
country's security crisis the top priority.
Three U.S. soldiers were killed and eight wounded in
a roadside blast north of Baghdad on Friday, the
U.S. military said.
And mortars hit houses in the northern city of
Samarra, wounding at least 13 people, police and
doctors said.
Jaafari, a soft spoken man who believes dialogue can
ease Iraq's problems, was nominated to be prime
minister by the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the
Jan 30 election.
The alliance will have a slim majority in the
275-seat National Assembly but must cut a deal to
secure the two-thirds majority it needs to form a
government.
A Kurdish coalition is in a strong bargaining
position after coming second in the ballot and
securing 75 seats.
The Kurds could give their backing to Jaafari or the
group led by secular Shi'ite Iyad Allawi, which
clinched 40 seats after coming third and is
determined to keep Allawi at the country's helm as
prime minister.
The frontrunner to be Iraq's next prime minister
held talks with the country's top Shi'ite cleric on
Friday on ways to include all parties in politics as
negotiations on forming a new government looked set
to drag on.
"There is an important issue we discussed: the
participation of our brothers who could not take
part in the election," Ibrahim al-Jaafari told
reporters after meeting Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in
the southern city of Najaf.
"The next government requires consultation and
consensus."
Islamist Shi'ite Jaafari and other politicians are
jockeying for the top positions in the next
government after last month's election, negotiations
complicated by ethnic and sectarian issues in a
country plagued by violence.
Minority Sunnis, who have watched the majority
Shi'ites replace them as the leading power,
boycotted the election or did not vote due to fear
of violence.
The election result has raised concerns disaffected
Sunnis will join insurgents waging a campaign of
violence.
The United States' top military commander warned on
Friday that the insurgency could drag on for years
with history showing such uprisings can last a
decade or more.
"This is not the kind of business that can be done
in one year, two years probably," Air Force Gen.
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.
In Iraq, the government said it had captured a key
lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian
militant who is al Qaeda's leader in Iraq and behind
some of the bloodiest attacks.
Talib al-Dulaymi, known as Abu Qutaybah, was
captured on Feb. 20 in Anah, 60 km from Syria's
border.
"Abu Qutaybah was responsible for determining who,
when and how terrorist network leaders would meet
with Zarqawi," the government said. "Abu Qutaybah
filled the role of key lieutenant for the Zarqawi
network, arranging safe houses and transportation as
well as passing packages and funds to Zarqawi."
U.S. and Iraqi forces also said they had detained 35
insurgents in the northern city of Mosul, a mostly
Sunni Arab city.
Reuters
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