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The United States and the United Nations have agreed on the nomination of Iraqi Shiite leader Ibrahim Al-Jaafari as president when authority is handed over to Iraqis on June 30, the Egyptian Gazette daily said Friday, quoting a Turkish report.
Masoud al-Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party will be appointed first deputy and Ayad Alawi as second deputy, Turkish daily Bir Gun said in its Thursday's issue.
The paper quoted sources close to UN-US talks as saying that the Americans wanted Adnan Pachachi as prime minister.
All these selected figures were on the Iraqi Interim Governing Council (IGC), the report said.
Jaafari, the main spokesman of the Shiite Dawa party, was born in the central Iraqi city of Karbala and educated at Mosul University as a medical doctor.
He jointed the Dawa movement in 1966. The group, the oldest Islamist movement in Iraq, was previously based in Iran and launched a bloody campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1970's.
The campaign was crushed by Saddam in 1982. The group said it lost 77,000 members in its war against Saddam.
Jaafari was chosen as the first president of the IGC after the body was handpicked by the US-led coalition authority in July.
According to an agreement struck by US top administrator for Iraq Paul Bremer and the IGC on Nov. 15, the occupation authority will hand over power to Iraqis before July 1.
However, the accord put elections as late as in 2005 and favored regional caucuses as a way to select representatives to the transitional assembly, which would elect the Iraqi government.
A UN team of envoys in February also ruled out possibilities of holding general elections in the war-torn country before July 1.
(Xinhua News Agency May 1, 2004)
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