Iraq's ruling Shia Alliance nominated Jawad al-Maliki as its new candidate for prime minister on Friday in an effort to end four months of political paralysis over the formation of a new government.
No immediate reaction was available from Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties to the nomination of Maliki, who had previously been seen as an unlikely candidate because he was widely viewed as a sectarian politician.
The United States hopes Iraqi leaders will form a national unity government that can avert any slide into a sectarian civil war and draw Sunni Arab insurgents into the political process.
A senior Shia Alliance official said the bloc now had to put forward Maliki to Sunni and Kurdish alliances for approval, hopefully before parliament convened on Saturday. A television station run by the bloc also said Maliki had been nominated.
The Shia Alliance's original choice for the job, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, signalled in a televised speech on Thursday he was ready to step aside at the request of the bloc after resisting widespread calls for his resignation for months.
Even if Maliki, who is close to Jaafari, wins support from all political alliances, there are no guarantees he will manage to tackle the insurgency, ease sectarian strife and rescue an economy starved of foreign investment.
Parliamentarians, who have held only one session since elections in December, are widely expected to start choosing a speaker for the chamber and a presidential council, which must then put the nominee for prime minister to an assembly vote.
FIVE IRAQI SOLDIERS KILLED: Gunmen killed five Iraqi soldiers as they left a restaurant in the northern city of Baiji, police said, highlighting the security nightmare that a new government faces.
Sectarian violence has exploded since the February bombing of a Shia shrine touched off reprisals and counter-reprisals.
Hundreds of bodies with bullet holes and torture marks have turned up on streets and six more corpses were found on Friday in several parts of Baghdad.
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