IRAQ: The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, offered a rare concession to critics of the US on Iraq yesterday when he promised an accelerated handover of power to an Iraqi government.
As eight Iraqis were killed in the town of Baquba when mortars were fired into a market on Thursday night, Mr Powell said the US would set a six-month deadline for Iraqis to draw up a new constitution.
"They've got six months. It'll be a difficult deadline to meet, but we've got to get them going," he said. Until now the US administration and officials in the American-led authority in Baghdad had been reluctant to put a timeframe on the transfer of sovereignty.
An Iraqi constitutional convention of around 200 delegates is due to meet next month to hammer out the precise wording of a new constitution. They have been given no schedule, although officials had said the process would take several months.
Elections were to be held immediately after the new constitution was approved in a referendum, expected to come at the end of next year.
Iraqi governing council members say they have frequently been told it would be 18 months before elections were held.
"We want a transfer of power from the Americans to the Iraqis step by step and much faster," Mr Ahmad al-Barak, a human rights lawyer on the council, said this week.
Mr Powell's latest comments, made in an interview with the New York Times, raise the prospect of elections by the middle of next year.
His concession appears intended to placate critics of American performance in postwar Iraq in the hope of securing the passage of a new UN resolution drawing in more foreign troops and financial aid.
France, for example, had insisted that power be handed to an Iraqi government within months.
Meanwhile, the UN yesterday began the sad task of pulling out much of its international staff from Iraq after two bomb attacks on their Baghdad headquarters in the past six weeks.
"It sounds crazy but I am upset to leave," said one UN staff member preparing to travel to Jordan. "There is so much work for us to do in Iraq."
The headquarters has been a forlorn place since a massive truck-bomb attack in August reduced much of the compound where UN workers stay to a pile of rubble. Yesterday a line of cars prepared to whisk staff away.
Six hundred staff were stationed in Iraq before the attack, which killed 22 people, including the chief UN envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The UN's pullout is likely to take its toll on the political process in Iraq, as well as discouraging other NGOs from returning personnel who also left after the UN bombing.
Washington has already expressed its disappointment at the decision, taken as the Bush administration pushes for broader international support for Iraq's reconstruction amid an increasing security crisis in the country.
Yesterday members of the US-led administration expressed their frustration. Iraq's de-facto governor, Mr Paul Bremmer, said: "If the UN is going to spend some time out of the country thinking about whether they can go back, that is time that is lost. That is more dangerous for our soldiers."
For the UN's remaining international staff the work goes on in Iraq, where the continuing instability was highlighted by a mortar attack on a market in Bacuba, north of Baghdad, which left eight civilians dead and 18 injured.
A UN spokeswoman said: "I must stress that this is a downsizing of our operation, and we are as committed as ever to helping Iraqis rebuild their country." - (Additional reporting Guardian Service)