WASHINGTON, July 21: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has recommended to the Security Council that Iraq’s new governing council be treated as the equivalent of an interim government, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

The governing council is a 25-member body selected by American officials to handle day-to-day jobs in Iraq.

“This is the interim Iraqi authority that the Security Council resolution 1483 urged,” Ahmed Fawzi, a UN spokesman in Baghdad told the Post.

In a report to the Security Council, to be made public shortly, Annan calls the governing council “a broadly representative partner with whom the United Nations and the international community at large can engage.”

Earlier on Friday Annan had urged the United States and Britain to set out a clear and specific sequence of events leading to the end of military occupation and a clear and specific timetable leading to the full restoration of sovereignty of Iraq.

To win the Security Council’s support for the recommendation, the US-appointed governing council has dispatched a three-member delegation to New York that includes Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, former Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi and Akila Hashimi, a woman who had served as an Iraqi diplomat under Saddam Hussein’s government.

Many critics have dismissed the new group as American puppets. The Security Council is slated to make a decision soon, and an endorsement would likely start the ball rolling on reconstruction donations from foreign governments.