BAGHDAD, Sept 24: Iraq’s leaders stepped back from the brink of a political crisis on Sunday in the hope of preventing a dispute over local control of oilfields erupting into all-out civil war.

The deal, if it holds through two more days of parliamentary debate, effectively kills off plans by some Shia leaders to hive off a big, autonomous federal region in their oil-rich southern heartland for the best part of two years.

In return, moderate Sunni leaders dropped a threat to boycott the new parliament and agreed to discuss how to implement constitutional provisions for Iraq to be a federal state. Ethnic Kurds maintain the broad autonomy they fought to secure from Saddam Hussein in the north.

“We don’t necessarily agree with all of it but it is a way forward,” Saleem al-Jibouri, a negotiator from the Sunnis’ Accordance Front, said of a deal that will freeze for 18 months any new law allowing provinces to form autonomous regions.

With a fifth of the seats, his bloc now felt a boycott would only have prolonged the crisis: “We wanted a consensus ... It could have a positive effect on the street, which is bleeding.”

Ali al-Adeeb of the Shia Dawa party said: “If we’d insisted on our position and they’d held their ground, we’d have got nowhere. I hope this can calm tensions in parliament.”

No new region was likely within two years, he added.

Under the deal, parliament will on Monday form a committee, proposed by Sunnis, to consider constitutional amendments over the next year. On Tuesday, it should hear a first reading of a Shia-sponsored bill on how to form regions. But any eventual law would not go into effect for 18 months after being passed.

Though the main Shia bloc has a near-majority, the timing holds out the possibility of further compromises next year.

With a constitutional deadline looming in four weeks, a longer stalemate could have undermined efforts by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, also from Dawa, to consolidate his grip on power and to hold together his US-sponsored national unity government.

Sectarian passions are running high at the start of Ramazan. Sunni militants claimed a bombing in the Baghdad stronghold of a militia on Saturday that killed 34 people lining up for fuel for their stoves.

Shias begin Ramazan on Monday — two days after Sunnis. US commanders have warned of a surge in violence.

“We are all invited to take advantage of the days of Allah’s great month to establish bonds of brotherhood,” Mr Maliki said.

Two US marines were killed on Sunday in fighting in the Sunni heartland of Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and a dozen people died in several bomb attacks, mostly in Baghdad.

More than 100 people a day are being killed in violence concentrated in the divided city of seven million, the United Nations estimates. Bloodshed is not confined to the capital, however. In one northern town, morgue officials showed reporters severed heads dumped in the oil town of Baiji on Saturday.

Guerillas have been fighting the US troops since 2003, but ‘death squad’ killings on all sides are now the main concern for US and Iraqi leaders fearful of a civil war.

For the second time in two days, Iraqi officials said they had seized a man they called a top Sunni militant.

Officials in the US-led forces in Iraq have confessed to fears political leaders may let their own mutual suspicions drag the nation of 26 million into all-out sectarian conflict that could then involve Iran and Arab states.

One senior official said, however, he had seen signs in the parliamentary process over the past week that gave him hope.

He noted in particular that demands for a big, powerful Shia region comprising all nine of the 18 of Iraq’s provinces south of Baghdad do not have solid support beyond the biggest Shia political party, SCIRI, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.—Reuters