No US pullout soon, Iraqi leaders say

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's interim president and defense minister said yesterday that withdrawing US troops from Iraq is out of the question for the time being, in a stark reminder of the danger posed by the Iraqi insurgency even after Sunday's election.

As Iraq reopened its international airport and allowed traffic back on the road, President Ghazi al-Yawer said it would be ''complete nonsense" for foreign troops to leave the country right away.

Vote-counting in the landmark election continued with no results announced, but a cleric-backed alliance of Shi'ite Muslims said its projections showed a big win over US-backed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's political ticket.

If true, a group of Shi'ite leaders, some of whom may prefer an Iranian-style theocracy, would take the lead role in a national assembly slated to select an interim government and draft the nation's constitution.

The development could further alienate Iraq's minority Sunni Muslim population, many of whom distrust Iraq's Shi'ite majority and, in particular, the United Iraqi Alliance. The alliance was formed with the guidance of the top Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Although Shi'ite leaders say they don't intend to impose a government run by clerics, suspicions persist that the alliance would push for a constitution based solely on Islamic law or clerical rule.

To combat these suspicions, Hussain Shahristani, a prominent nuclear physicist who is on the Iraqi Alliance list and helped with its formation, said his group is reaching out to Sunni political groups and offering to bring them into the political process even without seats in the assembly.

Shahristani acknowledged that Sistani counseled people to vote for the Iraqi Alliance because ''there are individuals in this alliance that the Iraqis can trust to put together a constitution."

But with the election over, Sistani has now said he'll have no further role in the political arena, Shahristani said.

If figures given by Shahristani are close to being correct, his group will be the key player in the process. He said the United Iraqi Alliance sent out some 13,000 observers on election day who documented voting tallies for about 500,000 voters.

From that sampling, Shahristani said, alliance officials calculated that their ticket took about 80 percent of the vote in several southern provinces and more than 50 percent in places such as Baghdad and Diyala Province, where the population is split between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

It wasn't possible to confirm Shahristani's assertions, though there's no question that the alliance garnered many votes.

Election officials, including the UN representative on the Iraqi electoral commission, Carlos Valenzuela, had no comment.

''I can offer no confirmation of the substance -- zero. So far, it is just a [United Iraqi Alliance] claim," an US diplomat in Baghdad said in an e-mail exchange, insisting on anonymity. ''We have no access to the actual ballot count."

Vote counting began yesterday morning under UN supervision in a building inside the Green Zone compound guarded by American tanks and troops. Iraqis sat at computer terminals entering tallies throughout the day, and organizers said they would work in shifts around the clock.

UN vote observer Mauricio Claudio said he thought the process could take 10 days.