A senior member of Iraq's Governing Council said this morning that agreement had been reached with the country's top Shi'ite Muslim cleric over the terms of an interim constitution and the document will be signed tomorrow.
"We have reached an agreement. There is going to be very good news very soon," Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a Shi'ite on the 25-member Council, told reporters after emerging from half an hour of talks with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive cleric who wields huge influence among Iraq's Shi'ite majority.
"We are going to sign (the interim constitution) on Monday."
Approval of the interim constitution is a crucial step in the process of the United States handing sovereignty back to Iraqis on June 30th. Any lengthy delay in signing the document could create problems for the handover schedule.
US officials have described the disputes over the document as nothing out of the ordinary in a nascent democracy and say that "98 per cent" of the document is agreed.
The document was due to have been signed with fanfare on Friday but at the last minute five Shi'ites balked after it emerged that Sistani, a 73-year-old Iranian-born cleric, objected to at least two key clauses in the document.
The signing ceremony was suspended and a delegation of leading Shi'ite members of the Council has spent the weekend in talks with Sistani and his aides in the holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, where the cleric lives.