BAGHDAD, 16 March 2004 — Rifts over the role the United Nations should play in assembling Iraq’s new caretaker government bubbled to the surface yesterday, complicating US plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraq by June 30. The results of Spain’s general elections were also an apparent blow for the US-led coalition as the country’s prime minister-elect said he would most likely pull 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq by the end of June.

On the ground, an Arab member of Kirkuk’s city council was shot dead in the ethnically tense northern Iraqi city. Seven US soldiers were killed over the weekend by insurgents’ favored technique, the roadside bomb. Iraq’s interim 25-member Governing Council was divided yesterday over the role the United Nations should play in assembling the new caretaker government which is set to take back sovereignty from the US-led coalition on June 30.

“Some want it small. Others want a bigger role,” Kurdish council member Mahmoud Othman told AFP. “There will be discussions. It will be settled,” he said. Intifadh Qanbar, a spokesman for Shiite council member and Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, said his boss was opposed to a major role for the United Nations. “The process has to be run by Iraqis not by outsiders.”

Qanbar said discussions were continuing this week to resolve in what capacity the United Nations will be present in Iraq in the countdown to the end of the US-led occupation. Othman said the chilly reception to the UN seemed to be coming from Iraq’s Shiite majority. “I think that they were not happy with the report given by the UN delegation that came to Iraq” last month, Othman said.

That delegation, led by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, supported the US position that elections were impossible before June and were at least eight months away. Brahimi’s report cited Iraq’s lack of electoral infrastructure, including the absence of electoral rolls and law.

His verdict came as a blow to the Shiites and their spiritual guide Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who had demanded snap poll and had welcomed the UN mission, hoping it would validate their views.

Senior White House official Robert Blackwill arrived in Baghdad Saturday on a reported mission to help settle the rift. Both the United States and many members of the council want the United Nations to advise on the plans for a caretaker government in the hope that it will bestow legitimacy on the process both at home and abroad.

Already in the middle of their biggest troop rotation since World War II, US forces face a possible hole in southern Iraq after Sunday’s Spanish elections threw out the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar. Spanish troops would be pulled out of Iraq unless a UN-led multinational force takes over after June 30, Socialist Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said.

In Kirkuk, Akar Nizal was shot dead at a traffic stop not far from the local government building, police chief Turhan Yussef told AFP. Nizal was elected last May to the local council and was known for a hard-line stance toward the city’s Kurdish majority who have been pushing to incorporate the city within the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.