Shiite leaders are pushing a new plan for the transfer of power in Iraq that calls for partial elections, with balloting in the relatively secure Shiite and Kurdish areas but not in the more turbulent "Sunni triangle."
The proposal, which has grown out of an emerging alliance between Kurdish and Shiite political parties, is part of the intensifying scramble for power among politicians before the United Nations announcement, expected this week, on whether election are feasible in Iraq.
But partial elections, American officials said, would further alienate the Sunnis, who are already generating most of the violence against the Americans and their Iraqi allies.
"Allowing citizens from some regions to vote and disenfranchising others certainly does not inspire credibility and legitimacy," a senior American official in Baghdad said.
Leaders of Iraq's Shiites, the country's largest single group, said their plan is the only feasible way to have any kind of elections while still allowing American administrators to transfer authority to the Iraqi people by June 30, the date set in an American-Iraqi agreement last November.
"Partial elections is one of the possibilities on the table," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite political leader and a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "There are places secure enough where we can hold elections right now. Those places happen to be in the north and in the south."
Kurdish leaders would not comment specifically on the plan, but they did emphasize a new "strategic relationship" with Shiite clerics in their discussions.
Barham Salih, prime minister of the Partiotic Union of Kurdistan, a leading Kurdish party, said it was important to work with the Shiite leadership because "these two major communities in Iraq should share an interest in fundamental change in the politics of Iraq."
He added, "Both have been excluded from power for almost 83 years of the Iraqi state."
On Sunday, Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union and a member of the Governing Council, traveled to the holy Shiite city of Najaf, where he met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites. After a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, Mr. Talabani said, "We have big hope in our Shia brothers."
The partial election plan calls for representatives in the predominantly Sunni areas to be chosen in tightly guarded caucuses, an idea vehemently opposed by members of the country's Sunni minority, who say it is illegitimate and would further divide Iraq's people.
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The proposal being discussed by Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish leaders is a sign of the enormousness of the task they are facing in choosing a representative government while a guerrilla war is raging over large swaths of the country.
Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaqobi, a cleric and part of the inner circle of Shiite leadership, called the partial election plan, "the lesser of two evils."
"There is no perfect solution," he said in an interview in Najaf. "But we have 10 stable provinces south of Baghdad where it's possible to have elections right now, and the Kurdistan areas have had their own government for 12 years. As for the Sunni areas, they can do what suits them best."
