Triumphant Iraqi Shias dismissed allegations that fraud helped them win last week's election, as President Jalal Talabani met their disappointed Sunni opponents on Saturday to try to calm sectarian tensions.
As political squabbling continued in Baghdad, national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told reporters in Najaf that he wanted detainees being released by the US military to be re-arrested. They include Saddam Hussein's weapons scientists Rihab Taha and Huda Ammash - "Dr Germ" and "Mrs Anthrax".
A lawyer for some of the detainees, believed still to be at a US base for their own protection, dismissed the demand as "pure theatre" and said they would soon leave Iraq.
Speaking a day after US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq and announced a modest cut in troop levels, Rubaie also said he expected 50,000 American soldiers to leave Iraq next year, with the remaining 100,000 departing in 2007.
The comments may carry little weight and were at odds with US and Iraqi government's avowed policy that withdrawals will not be timetabled but will depend on circumstances, especially the training of Iraqi forces and levels of rebel violence.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who served Christmas Eve dinner to troops in Mosul on Friday, told American soldiers in Iraq a day earlier their numbers could soon fall by 7,000.
There was no further word on the fate of six Sudanese, including a diplomat, who were kidnapped in Baghdad on Friday, nor of four Western hostages who have been held by Islamist militants for nearly a month.
Friends and relatives of the four - two Canadians, a Briton and an American - said they had placed a series of radio and newspaper adverts in Arabic appealing for their release. Iraq's tiny Christian community prepared for Christmas at the end of a week in which seasonal goodwill between Sunni and Shia Muslims has been in short supply.
After Friday's show of strength by Sunnis, who marched through Baghdad in their tens of thousands calling for a rerun of the December 15 election, which they allege was fixed, the country's main Shia coalition hit back on Saturday.
They accused their opponents of being sore losers and insisted the country's next prime minister should come from within their own Shia Islamist ranks.
"There will be no retreat and no rerun of the election," said Jawad al-Maliki, a senior member of one of the main parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shia alliance which appears to have triumphed in the vote. "In the end we have to accept the results and the will of the people."
Unofficial but near-complete results from last week's poll suggest the UIA did better than expected in some key areas of the country, notably Baghdad where they took 59 percent of the vote compared with just 19 percent for their nearest Sunni rivals.
In response, at least two dozen Sunni parties said the results were fixed. Some warned that a failure to address their complaints would anger the Sunni insurgency - elements of which declared an informal truce to allow the election to go ahead - and inevitably lead to a rise in violence.
There has already been an increase in shootings and bombings after the lull of the election period. Ten Iraqi soldiers were killed in an attack on their post on Friday and a suicide bomber attacked a Shia mosque.
On Saturday at least nine Iraqis were killed and police found seven bodies riddled with bullets in southern Baghdad.
The Electoral Commission, with UN backing, has all but ruled out any rerun. Of hundreds of complaints only 20 were rated "red", or serious enough to affect a result, officials said. These were distributed across the country, they added, countering Alliance claims that fraud was mainly in Sunni areas.
The Commission also said some 90 of more than 7,000 candidates had been struck off for having high-level ties to Saddam's Baath party - again, unlikely to affect the results.
Maliki said the UIA would not nominate a prime minister until final election results are given early in the new year. Alliance sources say the coalition's front runners are interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, leader of the Dawa party, and Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mehdi from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
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