Iraqi council defends power transfer plan

The US civilian overseer for Iraq, Paul Bremer, meanwhile, was to stop off at the White House before attending next week's UN talks with the interim Governing Council in New York.

Bremer may meet with President George W. Bush on Friday, but is certain to sit down with White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, according to a senior US administration official.

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As a delegation of the US-sponsored Governing Council left for the UN talks, interim foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari insisted that the coalition plans for a power transfer in Iraq were still on track.

He said Monday's talks among UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, current Governing Council president Adnan Pachachi and Bremer would focus on the UN's return to Iraq.

"We are going to hear what the United Nations has to say more than anything else because the invitation is coming from them," Zebari said, shortly before departure from a US military facility at Baghdad's international airport.

"The starting point in my opinion is the return of the United Nations to Iraq and the reopening of its office."

Annan pulled non-Iraqi UN staff out of the country after attacks on aid agencies, including a bombing which killed the senior UN official in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 others at the world body's Baghdad headquarters in August.

The UN talks come as the US-led administration appears on a collision course with Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has rallied thousands of supporters behind a call for direct elections in Iraq.

Sistani says a November 15 power transfer deal between Washington and Iraq, providing for regional caucuses to select a provisional leadership by mid-year, would give birth to an illegitimate government still in thrall to the coalition.

Thousands of supporters of Sistani, revered by Iraq's 15 million Shiite Muslim majority, demonstrated in the southern city of Basra on Thursday to back his call for early direct elections.