Iraq’s major political parties agreed Tuesday evening to appoint a president and two vice presidents at a meeting of the National Assembly on Wednesday, breaking a two-month deadlock in negotiations to form a new government, senior Iraqi officials said.
The assembly is expected to name Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president; Adel Abdel Mahdi, a prominent Shiite Arab politician, as vice president; and Ghazi al-Yawar, the Sunni Arab president of the interim government, as the other vice president, said Hussain al-Shahristani, a vice speaker of the assembly.
The agreement ends an impasse between the main parties that had threatened to undermine the confidence built during the Jan. 30 elections, when Iraqis defied insurgent threats to vote in droves. In the past weeks, the Iraqi public has shown increasing impatience with the gridlock, and U.S. military commanders have warned that a continued lack of a government could lead to a rise in insurgent violence.
Also Tuesday, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former White House official who has served as U.S. ambassador in his native Afghanistan, was named to take over the post in Iraq.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced his selection at a State Department ceremony, where Khalilzad pledged to work to improve the lives of Iraqis through postwar reconstruction so the country “can stand on its own feet.”
The Kurds had been pushing hard for Talabani to be president, and the Shiite parties said weeks ago that they would respect the nomination. Although the prime minister, who is likely to be a Shiite, will wield the most power, Talabani’s appointment will give the Kurds strong leverage in the new government and in the coming negotiations over the permanent constitution. Then the Kurds will no doubt press for broad autonomous powers.
The president and vice presidents, who make up the presidency council, will have two weeks from their appointment to name a prime minister, who will then select the Cabinet. The new government has to be approved by a majority vote of the assembly, according to the interim constitution.
As the political stalemate appeared to be coming to an end, U.S. and Iraqi officials reported a wave of violence that resulted in the deaths of four U.S. troops and at least one Iraqi army officer.
Two of the Americans and the Iraqi officer were killed in a pitched battle on Monday with dozens of insurgents in eastern Iraq, the U.S. military said. The battle began at 4 p.m., when two battalions of the Iraqi Army stumbled across the guerrillas in a search for weapons in a remote part of Diyala province, the military said. U.S. forces sent in air support and troops from the 278th Regimental Combat Team.
The military said a soldier with Task Force Baghdad died Tuesday morning when his vehicle hit a bomb in the southern part of the capital. A Marine was killed Monday by an explosion in Anbar province, the restive desert region dominated by Sunni Arabs west of Baghdad.
