BAGHDAD, 24 January 2004 — Pressure on Washington to hold direct elections in Iraq mounted yesterday as a high profile member of the US-appointed Governing Council backed the popular call for polls before a July handover of power.

The United States plans to hand sovereignty back to Iraqis by July 1, but says there is not enough time to arrange elections first. It wants regional caucuses to appoint a transitional government, paving the way for polls in 2005. There have been huge popular protests across Iraq, spearheaded by the majority Shiite community, rejecting the plan and demanding that Iraqis themselves be allowed to choose who governs them.

Yesterday, Ahmad Chalabi, a member of Iraq’s Governing Council generally seen as close to Washington, said it would be possible to hold elections before the mid-year deadline, dealing another blow to the US political plan for Iraq. “Direct elections are possible,” Chalabi told a think tank conference in Washington. “Seek to make them possible and they will be possible.”

Iraq’s Shiites, who represent 60 percent of the population, have mounted big demonstrations across Iraq in the past week, peacefully supporting their top leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani who says direct elections are essential.

Sistani yesterday called a halt to mass protests against US plans for handing over power, offering much-needed breathing room to the coalition as it counted the cost of a new wave of rebel attacks.

It is vital “to wait until the United States and the UN clarify their positions on the election procedure to choose the nature of the next Iraqi government,” Sistani spokesman Sheikh Abdel Mahdi Al-Karbalai said in a sermon at Karbala. Earlier yesterday, 2,000 people marched in Sistani’s name in the town of Dugail, north of Baghdad.

While the potential UN mission would meet one of Sistani’s key demands, it stirred the wrath of firebrand radical Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr, who branded the world body “dishonest” and subservient to America.

“I refuse the participation of the United Nations in supervising elections, because it is not honest and it follows America,” Sadr told worshipers in Najaf.

The US governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, who has insisted elections are impossible before July 1, and Governing Council members met UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday and asked a UN team to go to Iraq to assess the situation.

The White House said yesterday President George W. Bush wanted a quick decision from the United Nations, whose staff suffered deadly attacks in Iraq last year, on sending a team to Iraq to look at the issue of direct elections.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the current Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi urged the United Nations to send a mission to Baghdad to help put an end to the differences of opinion in Iraq. “This is important because we hope it would put an end to the differences, or differences of emphasis, on whether the selection of the members of the legislative assembly should be done through elections or not,” Pachachi said.

Meanwhile, the US-led coalition was facing an alarming shift in the nine-month insurgency that has blighted its presence in Iraq, with rebels now openly directing their fire at civilians and police. Some 24 hours of guerrilla attacks ending Thursday left nine Iraqis dead. Two US soldiers were also killed and another two injured.