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DUBAI, Feb 21: It will be impossible to organise elections in Iraq for another year to 15 months for technical reasons, US civil administrator Paul Bremer told Al Arabiya television in an interview broadcast on Saturday.
But the US-led coalition said the Dubai-based Arab satellite news channel had misinterpreted Ambassador Bremer's comments.
"It is not Ambassador Bremer's view that it will take 15 months. That is one date-range estimate we have had, but that is one end of a range," senior coalition spokesman Dan Senor told a Baghdad news conference.
"The UN estimates somewhere between a year to 15 months, and it might be that, but it could be sped up," he added.
Paul Bremer, quoted by Al Arabiya in an Arabic voiceover of the interview, said "the main problem is technical ... and this problem will take time ... a year or 15 months."
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday ruled out holding direct elections in war-torn Iraq before a planned June 30 transfer of power from the coalition to Iraqi self-rule.
In the Al-Arabiya report, Bremer noted the absence in Iraq of voter lists or legislation covering elections and political parties as, he said, a visiting UN team highlighted last week.
"These are major technical difficulties which are an obstacle to elections and make it impossible," to hold them.
Shias, who contest US plans to hand power over to an unelected authority in the summer, have demanded to know when national polls will finally be held after Annan recommended that a caretaker regime be selected for the short term.
US officials have long argued that widespread insecurity and a lack of electoral infrastructure prevented early elections in Iraq after the ouster of president Saddam Hussein last April.
Al Arabiya broadcast brief excerpts of the Bremer interview due to be aired in full on Monday night.
CONVOY ATTACKED: Four US soldiers were wounded and their Iraqi translator was killed on Saturday when guerillas ambushed their convoy south of Baghdad, the US army said.
"Four US soldiers were wounded and their Iraqi translator was killed in a small arms fire ambush 22kms south of Iskandariya (near Baghdad). Two civilian type SUVs were destroyed in the attack," a US military spokeswoman said.
PUBLIC OPINION: A poll of university-educated Iraqi men in Baghdad showed that almost three out of them do not believe the country's current leaders are fit to take over from the US-led authority.
The poll, to be published on Sunday by the independent Al Zaman newspaper, shows that 72 per cent of them believe there are "no (current) political leaders who are acceptable or capable of receiving power".
Only 11 percent said some of the Iraqi leaders on the US-appointed interim Governing Council are fit to take the reins of the strife-torn country from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
SHELLS SEIZED: US soldiers from the Fourthb Infantry Division have seized two weapons caches containing at least 8,000 rounds of 152mm artillery shells near Baghdad, the US military said on Saturday.
An Iraqi informant led troops to the two stashes in the town of Khan Bani Saad, on the outskirts of the capital, on Friday morning, the division's spokeswoman Major Josslyn Aberle said.
DEMOCRACY TRAINING: A private US think-tank hired by the US government has designed a crash course in democracy across Iraq as a way of preparing people for the US-led coalition's handover of power to Iraqis by June 30.-AFP/Reuters
