BAGHDAD, 15 March 2005 — Talks on forming Iraq’s government were at an impasse yesterday over Kurdish demands on the ethnically-divided city of Kirkuk and their peshmerga fighters, as violent attacks killed at least eight people.

With the historic first session of the country’s new Parliament just two days away, Kurdish chieftain Jalal Talabani said negotiations with Iraq’s election-winning Shiite list had fallen into deadlock.

“There are disagreements about two points. The first is the fate of the peshmerga, and the second one is concerning Kirkuk. Our negotiations with the (Shiite) alliance continue,” Talabani told reporters as he announced he was heading to Baghdad for tomorrow’s session of the 275-member national assembly.

He added the Kurds wanted to seal an agreement with the Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and then bring other parties into the new government, including outgoing Prime Minister Iyad Allawi who has so far refused any post other than premier.

Talabani, who is the frontrunner for Iraq’s presidency, was speaking after Kurdish leaders said Sunday they were insisting on changes to a draft agreement setting out the terms for an alliance with the UIA, which has the largest share of seats in the new Parliament with 146 members.

The Kurds want iron-clad commitments that their tens of thousands of peshmerga fighters will continue to provide security in the three Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dahuk and Sulaimaniyah.

The Kurds also want concrete pledges that the new government will resettle the tens of thousands of Kurds expelled from Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein over three decades and that it will work to restore territory to Kirkuk that Saddam apportioned to other provinces.

For their part, the Shiites, poised for their first real taste of political power, are eager to reach out to Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Christians and Turkmen as a means to stave off the threat of the country sliding into civil war.

As the sides debated the shape of the next government, Shiite demonstrators burned the Jordanian flag on top of the embassy in Baghdad in protest at the suspected involvement of a Jordanian man in the Feb. 28 suicide bomb attack in Hilla, south of Baghdad, that killed 118 people.

In fresh violence, an Iraqi cameraman, Husam Hilal Sarsam, working for a Kurdish-language television station was among eight people killed across the country.