DUBAI, Oct 23: A Paris-based Iraqi leftist writer said on Wednesday he expected the Iraqi government to resume talks with exiled figures like himself on forming a new government which he might be offered to lead as part of Baghdad’s efforts to avert a US strike.

“Unfortunately, there is a convergence of elements that make me suitable” to head a new “government of national unity,” Abdulamir al-Rikabi, a Shiite Muslim journalist who has kept up contacts with the regime of President Saddam Hussein from his exile, told AFP by telephone.

“I am a Shia, a leftist who could be acceptable to leftist forces, a deep-rooted Arab, a writer and an activist with good Arab connections,” he said.

“I say ‘unfortunately’ because I am a journalist, not a statesman, but if I am asked to perform a national task (by heading a new government) I will do it,” Rikabi, 55, added.

Rikabi said there were indications that Baghdad was poised to resume talks with exiled “patriotic” opposition figures to hammer out a political arrangement that would address the concerns of the regime’s critics after Saddam pardoned all prisoners, including political prisoners — one of the main demands in previous negotiations.

He said he had met Iraqi officials in Amman in the summer, but declined to say who these were. Rikabi noted, however, that Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz had named him as the kind of “patriotic” opposition figure with whom Baghdad could do business in a recent television appearance in Beirut.

“Negotiations between the Iraqi government and exiled patriotic opposition figures have been ongoing for 11 years. I personally went to Baghdad in 1992 to negotiate with the government,” and this was publicly stated by Aziz in Paris in 1997 as well as a few days ago, he said.

“There is a current (within the Iraqi opposition) that has kept up a dialogue with the regime on introducing change by national (Iraqi) means” rather than having change imposed by the United States, Rikabi said, implicitly referring to US-backed Iraqi opposition groups.

IRAQ ATTACKS UN: Baghdad on Wednesday attacking the United Nations for the first time in the current crisis, after Washington gave the world body a new ultimatum to take tough action on Iraqi disarmament or see it go it alone.