"We reject Jaafari because we believe that Iraq needs a government of national unity and new faces," said Barhem Saleh, planning minister and a close aide to President Jalal Talabani.

Talabani, who predicted Saturday that the parliament elected in December should finally be able to meet in a week after two-and-a-half months of deadlock, dispatched Saleh to meet Sistani to explain Kurds' and Sunnis' opposition to Jaafari.

Saleh said Sistani heard "our arguments and underlined the need for continuing dialogues with other Iraqi factions," after his surprise visit to the southern holy city of Najaf to meet the revered cleric.

Kurds, Sunnis and secular political factions of Iraq have opposed Jaafari's candidacy, saying he had failed to curb the raging insurgency during his term.

Saleh also met radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, one of the Jaafari's main backers in the ruling religious-based United Iraqi Alliance.

"Sadr insisted on national unity and on consolidating the bonds between the Iraqis," said Saleh, adding however that Sadr vowed to continue supporting Jaafari.

Jaafari was selected by the Alliance by just one vote, clearly showing an inner division as many voted for vice president Adel Abdel Mahdi to lead the next government.

The opposing Kurdish group has 53 seats in the new 275-seat parliament, the Sunni National Concord Front has 44, and the list of former premier Iyad Allawi controls 25.

The Shiite Alliance is the largest block with 128 seats.

In violence over the last 24 hours, at least nine people were killed including five people who were gunned down in separate attacks on a Shiite and a Sunni mosque.

Three men guarding a Sunni mosque in Baghdad were shot dead overnight when gunmen dressed in police uniforms attacked the building, an interior ministry official said.

Two people were killed Saturday night when gunmen fired on a Shiite mosque frequented by Turkmen in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Separately, gunmen killed a nephew and a cousin of Sheikh Hareth al-Dari, who heads Iraq's main Sunni religious group the Committee of Muslim Scholars, a source close to the family said.

Attacks on the Sunni community have multiplied since the February 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine, sparking fears of an all-out sectarian war.

Two Iraqi soldiers were also killed by gunmen who fired on their vehicle in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Sunday, while police said the bodies of three men, two of them Shiites, were discovered in Nabai, 60 kilometres (37 miles) northeast of the capital.

Iraqia state television said that army forces had foiled an insurgent attack on a major Shiite shrine in northern Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the US military dismissed reports that foreign troops would leave Iraq by early 2007.

Two British newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Mirror, quoted unnamed senior British Army sources as saying the coalition intended to reduce its presence on the ground over the next 12 months, while withdrawing forces into bases. Later, the coalition would withdraw all remaining troops simultaneously.

The papers said that Washington and London believe their military presence is now counter-productive as foreign forces are increasingly viewed as occupation troops, even though they remain at the Iraqi government's request.

"The news report on a withdrawal of forces within a set timeframe is completely false," said US military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson.

"Any withdrawal will be linked to the ability of the Iraqi security forces to maintain domestic order on behalf of a representative Iraqi government that respects the rights of all its citizens," he added.

US-led forces currently number about 157,000, of which 136,000 are from the United States and 21,000 from 26 other coalition countries.

London also rejected the withdrawal reports, saying the British government had not altered its position set out by Defence Secretary John Reid on February 7.

Meanwhile, the United Nations urged the Iraqi government to publish its findings on whether interior ministry-linked forces had abused detainees and carried out extra-judicial killings.

"We have... received a lot of information and anecdotal reports about excessive use of force, and about illegal detention centres, disappearances of people, and reports we are not able to confirm through our own investigations because of the security situation," said UN representative Ashraf Qazi.

Sunni Arab leaders have repeatedly accused Shiite government-linked forces of kidnapping members of their community and illegally detaining or killing them.