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(Bloomberg) -- The cleric-backed coalition that
won the most seats in Iraq's Jan. 30 election for a
national assembly may join forces with the
second-placed Kurdish Alliance, Ahmad Chalabi, a
member of the coalition, said.
``There is a desire to reach an agreement and there
are positive developments toward that,'' Chalabi,
once a Pentagon- backed candidate for prime
minister, told Doha, Qatar-based al- Jazeera
television in a live interview. There are at least
two rounds of talks scheduled for today, Chalabi
said.
The United Iraqi Alliance, which gained 140 seats in
the vote and lost at least 15 when two parties
withdrew their support March 6, has nominated Dawa
party leader and interim vice president Ibrahim al-Jaafari
as its candidate for prime minister. He's running
against Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi whose
Iraqi List party took 40 seats. Chalabi withdrew his
candidacy to head the alliance last month.
Both groups have been courting the Kurds for weeks
in an attempt to create a coalition capable of
commanding the two thirds majority needed to create
a new government.
The 275-seat assembly will convene for the first
time on March 16 even if a government isn't selected
by then, Rowsch Shaways, Iraq's second interim vice
president, said yesterday. Hussein Shahristani, a
senior member of the United Iraqi Alliance, told
Agence France-Presse he thinks a final agreement
will be reached before the session starts.
The 77-seat strong Kurdish Alliance has repeatedly
outlined a set of demands that Kurdish leaders
insist must be met in return for their support;
among them the creation of a federal, secular state
and the extension of the autonomous Kurdish region
to cover all areas once inhabited by Kurds,
including the oil- rich city of Kirkuk.
Compromise
For an agreement to work, the United Iraqi Alliance
would have to drop its desire to entrench Islamic
law into the constitution and allow the Kurdish
Peshmerga militia to continue in existence in the
three Northern Iraqi provinces, known as Kurdistan,
that border Turkey and Iran.
The Kurds also want Jalal Talabani, leader of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a leading Alliance
party, to become president.
``The Kurdish leadership will ally itself with any
political entity that won seats, on the condition
that it recognizes and supports the rights of the
Kurdish people and their goals,'' Talabani said in a
March 4 statement posted on the PUK Web site.
Chalabi, who lived in Kurdistan when he opposed the
Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, suggested in
today's interview with Al- Jazzera that the top post
in the new government won't go to Allawi.
``We won't give the post of prime minister to any
one outside the Alliance that the majority of 8.55
million Iraqis voted for,'' Chalabi said.
Allawi has turned down an offer from the Shiite
Alliance to participate in the coalition government
that will be formed, Agence France-Presse reported
citing Shahristani.
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