Iraq's US-backed Governing Council has met a United Nations team that will judge if elections demanded by the Shi'ite majority can be held before a June 30 deadline for the hand over of power.
The U.N. delegation arrived on Saturday. It is the highest-level presence for the world body in Iraq since leaving after two bomb attacks on its Iraq offices last year, including one that killed mission chief Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and now an adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, led the team but refused to hint which way it would lean on the question of an early election.
"The United Nations only confirms its firm desire to do everything possible to help the Iraqi people...to get beyond the long ordeal they have suffered and to restore their independence and sovereignty and rebuild Iraq," he told reporters at the Governing Council's offices in the U.S. occupation headquarters.
Washington says there is not enough time or security to organise polls before the planned June 30 power handover. It wants to let regional caucuses choose a provisional government that would rule before full elections in 2005.
The plan sparked massive protests by Iraqi Shi'ites, who make up 60 percent of the population, after their most revered religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani rejected it.