Naming of president expected by week's end

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Iraq's National Assembly is expected to appoint the nation's president by this weekend, while behind-the-scenes wrangling continues over who will get key positions in the new Cabinet.

Sources close to the negotiations said a new government could be complete by April 1, as pressure builds from revered Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani and among ordinary Iraqis for the politicians to come to an agreement.

Atrocities against Iraqi civilians and security forces -- both politically motivated and mafia-style violence -- have been relentless since the Jan. 30 elections, which gave the country's Shi'ite majority 146 seats in the 275-member assembly.

Iraqi police yesterday announced the arrests of 30 men implicated in dozens of slayings, beheading and rapes, Agence France-Presse reported, as shootouts and the telltale smoke plume of a car bomb rose above the Baghdad skyline.

"People are so fed up," said Asmaa, a middle-aged Baghdad resident who declined to give her last name. The politicians, she said in a telephone interview, "are quarreling with each other."

"Everyone wants to take his share, each one wants to be minister, and the country is in complete chaos," she said.

Kidnappings are on the rise in the capital again after a lull. The son-in-law of Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's jailed henchmen, was recently taken hostage for a $750,000 ransom.

The Kurds, who won 77 seats in the assembly, are fighting hard to obtain guarantees that the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will be incorporated into Kurdistan, that their peshmerga militia be allowed to stand, and that a Kurd will lead the Oil Ministry and eight other ministries, said a Kurd in close contact with the leadership.

Although the Shi'ite bloc and the Kurds have agreed in principle to a deal, including how much of the oil budget the Kurds will get, the details have yet to be worked out and signed.

"If they don't come up with something in the next 10 days, they are going to be in trouble," said the Kurdish source, who has businesses in both Baghdad and the northern autonomous region of Kurdistan. If the National Assembly refuses to agree to Kurdish demands, he said, there will be no stability in the country.