BAGHDAD, 14 May 2006 — Pressure mounted on Iraq’s Shiites yesterday to form a new government that will stem the ongoing violence, as US President George W. Bush described militias as one of the main challenges to peace. Party officials were closeted in talks over the distribution of the key ministries, with Prime Minister-designate Nuri Al-Maliki’s office announcing meetings with representatives of all the major factions in Parliament.

“Maliki will present his candidates to party leaders over the next two days for their approval,” said Mufid Al-Jazairi, a former minister of culture and a member of ex-Premier Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi List Party, which is expected to take the defense ministry. “Two problems remain to be resolved over the next few days — the Ministry of Interior and the question of the Fadhila Party,” Hassan Al-Seniad, a deputy from Maliki’s Dawa Party said. Even so, Seniad said he expected a final Cabinet lineup by Monday, a day after Parliament reconvenes.

After it became clear that Dawa’s Hashem Al-Hashemi would not go on to lead the key Oil Ministry, the conservative Shiite Fadhila Party withdrew from talks, precipitating yet another crisis in the tortuous process of forming a Cabinet. Leadership of the Interior Ministry, responsible for security in the country, remains up in the air, despite statements to the contrary by Maliki last week.

A number of names have been put forward for the job, including independent Shiite Qassem Dawoud and the current minister, Bayan Baqr Solagh. Solagh, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite parties, has been criticized for his ties to militias and his inability to rein in sectarian-related bloodshed.

Bush weighed in on the sensitive militia issue on Friday, calling on the Iraqi government to counter the unauthorized forces. “Perhaps the main challenge is the militia that tend to take the law into their own hands,” he said following a meeting with ex-US secretaries of state. “It’s going to be up to the government to step up and take care of that militia so that the Iraqi people are confident in the security of their country,” he said.

British Gen. Robert Fry added in a teleconference from Baghdad on Friday that the key to resolving the militia issue lies in politics. Fry said Maliki must first “engage the political constituencies, which are connected to the main militias, lay out quite clearly what his political objectives are, and invite those political leaders to enter the legitimate political process and not remain outside of it. Before any form of military action was to have been taken, you first of all need political and also public consultation.”

In recent months, the largely Sunni-led insurgency has been increasingly overshadowed by sectarian violence in Iraq, much of which is believed to be perpetrated by the militias. The most powerful militias in the country, aside from the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north, belong to the Shiites. SCIRI’s Badr Brigades is one, and the Mahdi Army of firebrand cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr has been particularly implicated in the rash of corpses turning up around the country.

Gunmen killed the son of Iraq’s top judge along with two of his bodyguards and dumped their bodies in Baghdad, officials said. Other attacks outside the capital killed five Iraqis and a US soldier, police said. Police yesterday found the bodies of Ahmed Midhat Al-Mahmoud, 22, a lawyer, and two of his bodyguards in northern Baghdad’s Azamiyah district, said Hasan Sabri the head of the local council and Iraq’s deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali.

The killings came five months after the judge, Midhat Al-Mahmoud, survived a Dec. 4 suicide bomb attack against his home. Two people were injured in the attack. Ahmed Midhat Al-Mahmoud’s father heads the Supreme Judicial Council, a judicial supervisory body, which among other things swears in all judges and Parliament. The Mahmoud family is Shiite and the three bodies were found dumped onto a street in the mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Azamiyah, Sabri and Ali said.

The killings were the latest carried out against government officials or their families. It could also be part of a series of killings carried out by death squads and militias, who have kidnapped and killed hundreds of Sunnis and Shiites — often motivated by sectarian hatred.

Elsewhere, five Iraqis were killed in drive-by shootings yesterday, including a tribal sheik, while a US Army soldier died in a roadside bomb attack, officials said. The bodies of three Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured also were found in the capital, police said. The death of the US Army soldier in the roadside bombing yesterday south of Baghdad raised to at least 2,437 the number of members of the American military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.