Iraqi clerics meeting in Amman delayed - officials

AMMAN, Apr 21 (Reuters) Jordan today said it postponed a conference of Muslim religious leaders to try to heal sectarian divisions among Iraq's main Sunni and Shi'ite sects that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had phoned King Abdullah yesterday asking for the delay in the Arab League-sponsored conference planned for tomorrow in the presence of some of the Muslim world's most prominent clerics and many of Iraq's religious and tribal leaders.

''The Iraqi request to delay the Iraqi-Islamic Reconciliation Summit at the last minute was due to the preoccupation of a number of leading Iraqi figures with the consultations over the next government and their inability to attend the conference,'' Abdul Salam al-Abbadi, the conference chairman, told the state news agency.

Talabani had told the monarch many of the participants would be attending the session of the Iraqi parliament that was due to convene tomorrow amid hopes of breaking a deadlock over forming a national unity government.

The conference was endorsed by an Arab Summit in Khartoum last month as part of an broader initiative to prevent wider sectarian bloodletting in Iraq that the Arab world's majority Sunni leaders fear could spill over across the region.

No new date has been set for the meeting which had planned a declaration to be signed by top clerics from Egypt, Iran, the Arab Gulf and across the Muslim world ''that there was no religious reason for Shi'ite and Sunni hostility.'' Sectarian carnage in Iraq has exploded since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine touched off reprisals and counter-reprisals.

Reuters OM RS1603