By Ahmed Rasheed and Mussab al-Khairalla
Iraq's ruling Shi'ite Alliance nominated Jawad al-Maliki as its new candidate for prime minister on Friday in an effort to end four months of political paralysis over the formation of a new government.
No immediate reaction was available from Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties to the nomination of Maliki, who had previously been seen as an unlikely candidate because he was widely viewed as a sectarian politician.
The United States hopes Iraqi leaders will form a national unity government that can avert any slide into a sectarian civil war and draw Sunni Arab insurgents into the political process.
A senior Shi'ite Alliance official said the bloc now had to put forward Maliki to Sunni and Kurdish alliances for approval, hopefully before parliament convened on Saturday. A television station run by the bloc also said Maliki had been nominated.
The Shi'ite Alliance's original choice for the job, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, signaled in a televised speech on Thursday he was ready to step aside at the request of the bloc after resisting widespread calls for his resignation for months.
Even if Maliki, who is close to Jaafari, wins support from all political alliances, there are no guarantees he will manage to tackle the insurgency, ease sectarian strife and rescue an economy starved of foreign investment.
Parliamentarians, who have held only one session since elections in December, are widely expected to start choosing a speaker for the chamber and a presidential council, which must then put the nominee for prime minister to an assembly vote.
EXHAUSTED IRAQIS
Although a long-awaited deal on the prime minister is likely to be hailed by authorities as a victory for democracy, no candidate stands out as a strong, popular leader who can inspire confidence in Iraqis exhausted by one crisis after another.
Gunmen killed five Iraqi soldiers as they left a restaurant in the northern city of Baiji, police said, highlighting the security nightmare that a new government faces.
The lengthy political wrangling has left some Iraqis seeing no hope for their country, composed mainly of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and the majority Shi'ite community.
"The delay proved that the democratic experience failed in Iraq. We see many politicians who are actually not fit for any post," said Adil Abdulamir, 40, a university professor in Iraq's second city of Basra in the mostly Shi'ite south.
"The core of the problem is not Jaafari himself. The real issue is that all the alternate figures are lacking the political experience to run the country."
The United States is banking on a national unity government to stabilize the country and enable it to start bringing home its more than 130,000 troops.
Much also hinges on the performance of U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, who are meant to eventually take over security.
That is not expected any time soon and sectarian mistrust is so deep among Iraqis that the Shi'ite-dominated security forces are widely seen as part of the problem.
Sectarian violence has exploded since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine touched off reprisals and counter-reprisals.
Hundreds of bodies with bullet holes and torture marks have turned up on streets and six more corpses were found on Friday in several parts of Baghdad.
In northern Iraq, Iranian forces shelled Kurdish rebels on Iraqi territory on Friday to repel an attack, an Iraqi Kurdish official said.
"This morning Iranian Kurdish fighters infiltrated the border into the Iranian side and the Iranian army bombed the area and repelled them. The shelling hit Iraqi land at Sidakan," said Saadi Pira, an official in the leading PUK Kurdish party.
There was no immediate comment from Iran and no word on casualties.