The Fallujah siege angered many in the influential Sunni minority, producing calls to boycott the ballot, a move that could cost the new government much-needed legitimacy.
Sunni politician Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and a member of the Iraqi National Council, said delaying the ballot by three months or more would enable political leaders to persuade Sunni clerics and others to abandon their boycott call.
''I think that it will not be in the interest of anyone to let large segments of the Iraqi population be completely left out of the political process," Pachachi, leader of the Independent Democrats party, said.
Seven other Sunni parties also demanded a delay in the election, saying they want guarantees that they will not be marginalized in any new government, which is expected to be dominated by rival Shi'ites.
In a bid toward drawing Sunni support, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said an Iraqi delegation would meet in Amman, Jordan, with ''a number of political opposition movements," including some former Hussein supporters on the ''most-wanted list," to persuade them to abandon the insurgency and participate in the election.
No date for the meeting with former Ba'ath Party figures was announced, and Zebari did not say who would attend, although he ruled out contacts with terrorists. He said the meeting was encouraged by Arab governments at this week's international conference on Iraq at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.
It seemed the contacts were aimed at trying to strike a deal with nationalist opposition groups and dividing them from religious extremists such as Al Qaeda-linked terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian.
But a statement posted yesterday on an Islamist website and purportedly from the Ba'ath Party criticized the Sharm El-Sheikh conference for meddling in Iraqi affairs. It pledged that ''the Iraqi armed resistance" would keep fighting ''to expel the [American] occupation" and ''destroy the agent authority," meaning the Iraqi government.
The authenticity of the statement could not be determined, but it was written in a style routinely used by the party.
