Tens of thousands of Shia Muslims marched through Baghdad on Monday to demand early elections, as Iraq's US governor entreated the United Nations to back his political plans for Iraq.
Paul Bremer and members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council met UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a plan to hand power back to Iraqis by the end of June, before a US presidential election.
The plan would put power in the hands of an appointed transitional government, while many Iraqis, especially majority Shias, want direct elections now so they can choose who controls Iraq.
Washington, which defied UN allies in invading last year, hopes to persuade Annan to back its plan and help convince supporters of Iraq's most revered Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that his call for elections is premature.
The Governing Council also hopes that the meetings in New York will convince the United Nations to come back to Iraq.
Annan pulled international staff out of Iraq in October after bloody attacks on UN offices in Baghdad and has said it is still too dangerous for UN employees to return.
The talks come a day after a suicide car-bomb at the gates of the US headquarters in Baghdad killed at least 25 people and injured more than 100.
Japanese soldiers entered Iraq on Monday, the vanguard of a mission marking a historic shift from Tokyo's avoidance of conflict since World War Two.
The deployment poses a political risk for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose government could be rocked if there are casualties.
Under the US plan, regional caucuses will select a transitional assembly by the end of May and this will in turn pick an interim sovereign government by the end of June.
Full polls would follow after the writing of a constitution in 2005.
In Baghdad, a member of the Governing Council said insufficient security and the lack of electoral laws or voter registers made holding elections now impossible.
"At the moment it would be too hard to hold elections in Iraq," Iyad Allawi told Reuters in an interview.
But many Shias, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population and were oppressed by Saddam and previous Sunni Muslim rulers, want elections sooner. Many thousands waved banners and shouted slogans in support of Sistani in Baghdad.
"All the people are with you, Sayyed Ali," the crowd chanted. "Yes, yes to unity, yes, yes to elections." "Just as there are elections in Europe and America there should be elections here," said demonstrator Abu Qarar al-Bahadiri.
"America says it is democratic and brings freedom to countries. Well then it should bring us elections. Especially as we lived through 35 years of darkness, we need to have an election that represents the people."
The US military said an American soldier died on Sunday from wounds sustained in a bomb attack in the town of Samarra on Friday.
The death brought to 347 the number of US soldiers killed in action since the start of the war to oust Saddam Hussein. Including non-combat deaths, the toll stands at 501.
In the Shia holy city of Kerbala, 110 km (70 miles) south of Baghdad, witnesses said one man was killed and 13 were wounded on Sunday night when a hand grenade was hurled at crowd near a shrine in the holy city of Kerbala.
TWO IRAQI PARAMILITARIES SHOT DEAD, US SOLDIERS NET ARMS CACHE: Two Iraqi civil defence corps personnel were killed in the restive town of Balad overnight as fresh violence hit the Sunni Muslim belt north of the capital, officials said Monday.
In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, soldiers from the US 4th Infantry Division netted hundreds of weapons and arrested 22 suspects as part of Task Force Ironhorse, an ongoing counter-insurgency deployment, the military said.
The two Iraqi paramilitaries were killed and a third seriously wounded in an assault by unknown gunmen on their checkpoint on the outskirts of Balad, said Dalaf Halub, the corps commander in the town.
The attackers fled and the wounded man was evacuated from the scene by US troops, he added.
In Tikrit, a US soldier was lightly wounded when unknown assailants shot at his foot patrol near the 4th Infantry's headquarters, a US officer told AFP.
In the past 24 hours, US troops in Tikrit have confiscated scores of weapons, the US military said in an earlier statement.
They impounded six assault rifles, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers, four grenades, hundreds of mortar rounds, scores of rockets and missiles, as well as two home-made bombs, it said.
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