March, 14 2005	Monday	03 Safar 1426

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BAGHDAD, March 13: Talks between Iraq’s leading parties on forming a new government have collapsed, crushing hopes it would be in place before parliament, elected despite relentless violence, meets for the first time this week.

Officials from the Shia alliance that won the most votes and the Kurdish bloc that came second, said on Sunday they had failed to agree on two sticky issues — distributing top cabinet posts and extending the Kurds’ autonomous region in the north.

Parliament is due to meet on Wednesday, more than six weeks after a landmark election that gave many in Iraq hope that a new authority would clamp down on suicide attacks, car bombs and execution-style killings.

In the northern Iraqi town of Sharqat, a suicide car bomb killed six Iraqi soldiers on Saturday, the Iraqi army said.

In Mosul, a US soldier was killed by small arms fire on Friday, the American military said, and on Saturday a roadside bomb killed two US contractors south of Baghdad.

Many Iraqis blame politicians, for whom they say they risked their lives to cast ballots in the Jan 30 election, for prolonging a political vacuum while violence spirals.

Ahmad Chalabi, a top member of the Shia bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, returned empty-handed on Saturday from a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to save the proposed Kurdish-Shia alliance which has the two-thirds majority needed to form the government.

“The meetings have collapsed. There was no deal,” an aide to Chalabi told Reuters.

KURDS DEFIANT: Kurdish politicians were defiant, rebuffing the Shia alliance’s attempts to blame them for the deadlock.

“They want to lay the responsibility for the political equation solely on the Kurdish side,” Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, told Al Arabiya television.

“We are willing to sacrifice the presidency to the Shias if they sacrifice the premiership to a Sunni,” Salih said in a comment.—Reuters