Talks between Iraq's leading parties on forming a new government have broken down, crushing hopes it would be in place before the country's recently-elected parliament meets for the first time this week.
Officials from the Shia alliance that won the most votes and the Kurdish bloc that came second said today they had failed to agree on two issues - distributing senior cabinet posts and extending the Kurds' autonomous region in the north.
Parliament is due to meet on Wednesday, more than six weeks after a landmark election that gave many in Iraq hope that a new authority would clamp down on suicide attacks, car bombs and execution-style killings by mainly Sunni Arab insurgents.
Many Iraqis blame politicians, for whom they say they risked their lives to cast ballots in the January election, for prolonging a political vacuum while violence spirals.
Ahmad Chalabi, a top member of the Shia bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, returned empty-handed yesterday from a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to save the proposed Kurdish-Shi'ite alliance with the two-thirds majority needed to form the government.
"The meetings have collapsed. There was no deal," an aide to Chalabi told Reuters.
Kurdish politicians were defiant, rebuffing the Shia alliance's attempts to blame them for the deadlock.
"They want to lay the responsibility for the political equation solely on the Kurdish side," Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, told Al Arabiya television.
"We are willing to sacrifice the presidency to the Shia if the Shia sacrifice the premiership to a Sunni," Salih said in a comment laced with irony as the Shia bloc insists that as election winner it should nominate the prime minister.
The Kurds, who number about three million out of Iraq's 27 million people, want the presidency for Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, and a top ministry - interior, finance or defence.
They also want their share of oil revenue to rise to 25 percent from 17 percent now, and inclusion of Kirkuk in the Kurdistan federal region.
The crisis plays into the hands of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whose cabinet could now remain in a caretaker role until a general election due at the end of the year.
Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam, largely boycotted the January 30 vote and have little representation in the new assembly.
Sunni Arabs dominate insurgent groups that have staged increasingly audacious attacks on Shi'ite and official targets in their campaign to topple the US-backed government and stall efforts by the alliance to form a new cabinet.