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BAGHDAD, Iraq - A group of leading political parties Friday called for a six-month delay to the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, expressing concerns that widening violence would make voting impossible in large swaths of Iraq.
The 17-member group includes Iraq's two main Kurdish parties, which are key U.S. allies.
Speculation about the feasibility of January elections has swirled for months, and increased last week when dozens of mainly Sunni Muslim parties endorsed a boycott of the election.
The boycott plan prompted fears that any new parliament would lack credibility.
Friday's request is expected to put more pressure on interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his U.S. benefactors to reconsider their refusal to postpone the vote.
In Crawford, Texas, President Bush indicated Thursday that the United States would not support efforts to postpone Iraq's elections beyond Jan. 30.
"The Iraq election commission has scheduled elections in January, and I would hope they would go forward in January," the president told reporters during a public appearance near his Texas ranch, where his family is spending the Thanksgiving holiday.
The debate over whether to delay elections could further divide Iraqis along religious fault lines and threaten to ignite sectarian tension.
Iraq's Shiite majority, oppressed by Saddam Hussein's government and marginalized for much of this century, has been eager to seize significant power through the January vote, in which Iraqis will select parliamentarians who, in turn, will draft a new constitution and pick a president.
The country's Shiite religious parties have resisted attempts to push back elections, a position in which they now find themselves increasingly isolated.
The powerful Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has pushed for speedy elections and has launched a grass-roots get-out-the-vote campaign.
His endorsement would be crucial to any delay.
After their Friday conference, the 17 party representatives released a statement declaring that a delay was necessary pending "changes in the security situation and the completion of necessary organizational, administrative and technical preparations."
The meeting was held at the Baghdad home of Adnan Pachachi, an influential member of the now-disbanded Governing Council and the head of the Independent Democratic Movement, a Sunni party.
Organizers say they hope to build domestic and international consensus for a postponement.
"Now we must talk to the United Nations, the electoral commission and the government," said Saad Abdel Razaq, an Independent Democratic Movement spokesman.
Abdel Razaq cited security concerns and a desire to bring boycotters into the process as the main reasons for the delay request.
"We want to take time to have a dialogue and convince them to join the process," he said.
Allawi has repeatedly vowed to proceed with the elections. On Wednesday, the prime minister declared the vote to be "on course."
On Friday, there was confusion as to whether Allawi's own Iraqi National Accord party endorsed the request.
An Iraqi National Accord representative attended the meeting, and the party's name was listed among the 17 signatories.
But Hani Idrees, a member of the party's political bureau, said its representative had not signed the communiqué seeking the postponement.
The Iraqi National Accord continues to support the idea of January elections, Idrees said, but would be willing to support a delay only if "there was a wide consensus among all parties involved."
Abdel Razaq, however, insisted that the Iraqi National Accord "signed and agreed" with the delay request.
Even without that party's assent, Friday's announcement was a major boost for advocates of a vote delay.
Friday's list of signatories is diverse, including Kurdish and Sunni parties, Christians, socialists, a tribal group, and a women's group.
A similar group of parties gathered last week for a several-day conference in the northern city of Dukkan. After that meeting, only the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni religious party, openly endorsed a delay.
Kurdish parties were noncommittal, several Shiite parties were openly opposed to the idea, and the final conference statement asked only that the issue be seriously examined.
An elections expert with experience in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the endorsement by the two U.S. allies, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, represented a crucial shift.
"The Kurds were weakly aligned with the Shiites toward elections on time. Now they're weakly aligned with the Sunnis toward a delay," the expert said.
"There's a fight brewing and it looks like the Kurds just switched sides. ... This could get messy."
The Kurdish parties are somewhat surprising backers of an election delay, because the Kurds are politically well organized and will presumably turn out in large numbers to vote.
But the Kurds, keen to govern their northern homeland as an autonomous region, are uneasy about how the Shiites might exercise majority rule.
The Kurds lobbied the United Nations earlier this year for official recognition of the interim constitution, which gives the Kurds veto powers over the permanent constitution that is to be drafted.
Shiite leaders, including Sistani, opposed that, seeing it as a threat to the power they would wield over the writing of the constitution.
The Kurds are also intent on dominating provincial elections in ethnically mixed cities of the north, especially in Kirkuk, which is rich in oil.
The Kurdish parties have been moving settlers into Kirkuk and other areas south of the Kurdish region, arguing that they are reclaiming lands stripped from them by Saddam.
The more time they have to settle those areas before elections, the better their chances of faring well in the provincial polling.
The two top Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, didn't participate in Friday's meeting.
Nor did the Iraqi National Congress, led by former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, who has sought to reinvent himself as a Shiite populist after falling out with Washington.
Iraqi National Congress spokesman Entifadh Qanbar, in an interview on Al-Jazeera satellite news channel, denounced the delay proposal, saying it would lead to a loss of faith in the fledgling political forces and embolden the country's insurgency.
"Iraq's problems can only be solved at the ballot box," Qanbar said.
Hussein Hindawy, chairman of the U.N.-appointed Independent Electoral Commission, said Friday that the delay request would be studied.
Even if consensus for a delay can be reached, Iraqi authorities would have to find a way around Iraq's interim constitution, which stipulates that elections be held by the end of January.
The law, approved by the Governing Council and Paul Bremer, former U.S. administrator in Iraq, excludes any mechanism to alter the date.
"It's one of the few things that can't be changed," the electoral expert said.
But many Iraqis say the country's rulers have no choice because insurgents have extended their reach over large sections of Baghdad and other mainly Sunni areas, making it unlikely that the interim government can establish the stability needed for credible elections.
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