IRAQ: The frontrunner to be Iraq's next prime minister held talks with the country's top Shia cleric yesterday 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 Shia Jaafari and other politicians are jockeying for the top positions in the next government after last month's election, negotiations complicated by delicate ethnic and sectarian issues in a country plagued by violence.
Minority Sunnis, who watched the majority Shia replace them as the leading power after the polls, 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.
Iraq's 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 February 20th in Anah, 60 km (35 miles) 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." US and Iraqi forces, meanwhile, detained 35 insurgents in the northern city of Mosul, a mostly Sunni Arab city.
Shia 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 US soldiers were killed and eight wounded in a roadside blast north of Baghdad yesterday, the US 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 many problems, was nominated to be prime minister by the United Iraqi Alliance, which won last month's election. The alliance will have a slim majority in the elected 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, winning 25 per cent of the vote to secure it 75 seats in the parliament.
The Kurds could give their backing to Jaafari or the group led by secular Shia Iyad Allawi, which came third in the January 30th vote, clinching 40 seats in the assembly, and is determined to keep their leader at the country's helm as prime minister.
Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said yesterday 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 the naming of the country's top positions - a president and two vice-presidents, who must then decide on the prime minister - and Western diplomatic sources believe it could take weeks longer to form a government.