Jaafari aide says Iraq PM will not step aside

Baghdad, Apr 1: A senior aide to Ibrahim al-Jaafari said today that Iraq's interim prime minister would not step aside and give up his nomination for a second term despite public calls for him to do so within his own bloc.

''He is definitely not going to step down. He is the only candidate and will continue to the end,'' Jawad al-Maliki, a senior official in Jaafari's Dawa party, told Reuters.

Earlier, other senior officials in the Shi'ite Alliance bloc, of which Dawa is part, said publicly for the first time that Jaafari should quit in the face of Sunni and Kurdish objections, to allow the formation of a national unity government.

REUTERS