BAGHDAD, 27 January 2004 — Hopes were bleak yesterday of recovering alive three US soldiers lost when a boat capsized and a helicopter crashed in northern Iraq, as the country’s Shiite majority drew up battle plans in their campaign for swift elections.

The helicopter went down Sunday in the Tigris River near the main northern city of Mosul on a rescue mission after the US boat overturned in the afternoon, leaving two Iraqi police and a translator dead.

Search operations were continuing yesterday for the two US pilots and boat crewman. A US spokesman said rescue teams had briefly come under small-arms fire but there were no casualties.

An investigation is under way into the crash, but it is not believed to have been caused by hostile fire.

A police official in Mosul said the Kiowa Warrior helicopter had flown at low altitude into towing cables strung across the swollen river, which runs from Turkey to Syria before flowing south across Iraq to the Gulf.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s majority Shiites shifted up a gear in their drive to persuade the US-led coalition to rethink its plans for a transfer of power in June.

As the United Nations mulled sending a mission to the country to assess the feasibility of holding polls before the coalition’s June 30 handover deadline, Shiite leaders clamoring for elections hunkered down for strategy talks.

In a worrying shift for the coalition, some Shiite members of the usually compliant interim Governing Council are now siding with Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the election campaign’s standard bearer.

“Our discussion has moved to what we should tell the UN mission due to come here to study the possibility of holding elections,” said Council member Muwaffak Al-Rubaie after a meeting with Sistani in the city of Najaf.

But interim Interior Minister Nuri Badran said that Iraq’s security situation was not ripe for early elections.

“We wish this question could be postponed for a short while,” said Badran, who is himself a Shiite but represents the Iraqi National Accord, a secular faction.

The United States has argued that it would be difficult to hold free and fair elections before the deadline, given the persistent insurgency in Sunni areas and the lack of a census or an electoral register. Sistani has rallied tens of thousands to back his demands, but on Friday called a halt to protests saying the United Nations should be given time to study poll viability.

According to a Baghdad-based European diplomat, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was expected to announce later yesterday that he will be sending a mission to study the possibility of elections.

In continuing unrest across Iraq, four police officers were gunned down at a police station in the hotspot western town of Ramadi on Sunday while a home made bomb killed two bus passengers and wounded two others in the capital yesterday.

According to a report by the Iranian official news agency IRNA, a gang of armed assailants has kidnapped 20 Iranians in Iraq.

The US Army has also launched a formal investigation into the alleged killing by US troops of four Iraqi civilians including a seven-year-old boy earlier this month, a military spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile, Tokyo gave the final go-ahead to dispatch a total of 600 ground troops on a controversial humanitarian mission after months of wrangling that has divided the Japanese parliament and public.