U.N. Poised To Reenter Iraq

A U.N. team may leave in the next few days to assess the possibility of elections in Iraq, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday.

Annan had said previously that the U.S.-led coalition must guarantee security for the team before it is sent.

"I think we are making progress," Annan told reporters in Belgium. "The coalition has indicated to me, has promised us, it will do its utmost to protect the team that will work in Iraq. Therefore, in the next few days, the team should be able to travel to start work."

The United Nations pulled out of Iraq after its headquarters was attacked by a suicide bomber in August. Twenty-two people died, including Annan's special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The U.N. team is to examine whether it is possible to organize early elections as demanded by Shiite Muslim clergy, or whether a provisional government should be set up through other mechanisms.

U.S. officials fear early elections could lead to greater violence and want members of a new legislature to be named in regional caucuses. The legislature would in turn choose a new government to take power by July 1, formally ending the U.S.-led occupation.

The United States is hoping the U.N. intervention could break a deadlock between its coalition authority in Iraq and a powerful Islamic cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who is leading the call for early elections.

Annan said Wednesday that any mechanism for selecting a new government would need broad Iraqi support.

"If no agreement can be reached on that mechanism and the formula for the provisional government then I'm very much worried that there will be continuance of division and conflict," he said.

Annan left for Geneva on Friday after three days of talks in Brussels with European Union and Belgian officials.

Shiite's are believed to comprise 60 percent of Iraq's population, but were systematically repressed under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government.

The U.S.-led coalition authority is leery of early elections because there has been no census of Iraq to determine who its residents are, and therefore who may vote.

There is also the worry that at this early stage, former Baath party officials may be elected.

Al-Sistani's objections have been heeded before.

The current plan calling for caucuses and a July 1 handover is itself a revision of an earlier U.S. timetable that gave the interim Iraqi Governing Council power to set a constitutional convention in motion.

Under that earlier plan, power would be turned over to Iraqis only after the constitution was drafted and elections held.

The U.S. dropped that timetable in November, amid a mounting U.S. death toll, rising occupation costs and worries that the Governing Council was moving too slowly.