Masoud Barzani (L), Ahmed Chalabi (C) and Jalal Talabani at the opening of the Iraqi Opposition Conference in London

LONDON, December 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Disparate Iraqi opposition groups meeting in London early Monday, December 16, extended a conference, backed by Washington, for an extra day after failing to agree on the make-up of a committee that will articulate their plot for Iraq following an upcoming U.S. attack on Iraq.

Delegates who had assembled for a final overnight session were told to return later in the day as leaders of the various opposition groups met in a London hotel attempting to agree on the membership of the key body, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.

A U.S. team led by Washington's pointman on regime change in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was trying to broker an end to differences over the proposed "follow-up and coordination committee," which is supposed to liaise between various opposition groups and act as an "interlocutor" with world and regional powers.

Some delegates said the disagreements revolved around the distribution of seats on the planned body among the disparate groups and the ethnic or religious communities they represent. They said the committee was likely to have a membership of over 40.

One option under consideration is for a small steering group to be chosen from among the committee members to serve as an executive. Another is to break up the panel into specialized groups.

The final scheduled session had broken up Sunday night, December 15, after a dispute over a blueprint for the transitional period which would follow the eventual fall of the Baghdad regime.

That row was apparently resolved after the introduction of a clause in the document saying that Iraqis would be given the right to decide in a referendum whether they wanted the country to remain a republic or to reinstate the monarchy toppled in a 1958 coup.

The amendment was demanded by the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (CMM) which seeks the restoration of Iraq's monarchy.

But while one CMM delegate told AFP that his group had grudgingly agreed to a provision calling for the setting up of a three-member "sovereignty council" that would perform the functions of a head of state, another said the CMM was still insisting it should be struck out.

The closing session was supposed to reconvene at midnight (0000 GMT) to endorse a final declaration, but three and a half hours later, delegates were told that the conference, which is being held in anticipation of a U.S. attack on Iraq, would reconvene Monday morning.

Delegates said they believed the opposition leaders would eventually reach an agreement as Washington, which backed the conference, would not allow it to fail.

A source close to the U.S. team, which includes officials from the National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon, said they were trying to help the factions find common ground and broker satisfactory solutions to issues in dispute.

The source, who requested anonymity, confirmed that Washington did not want the Iraqi opposition to set up a provisional government.

The opposition groups "are outside Iraq. You can't exclude the people of Iraq from deciding their future," he told AFP.

The Iraqi National Congress (INC), one of the conference organizers, is seen as the main supporter of the formation of such an authority.

While INC leader Ahmad Chalabi has said there is no question of "parachuting" a government into Iraq, a spokesman for the organization said the opposition should at least start preparing for the day Saddam goes.

A conference organizer told AFP that a news conference scheduled for Monday morning to announce the conclusions of the gathering might still be held to unveil what participants had agreed on, chiefly a "political declaration."

A draft of the declaration, which he said had already been approved, upholds the rights of Iraq's various ethnic and religious communities and describes the Kurds' proposal for a federal arrangement as an appropriate basis for a solution to the Kurdish problem within a united Iraq.

The document "rejects any form of foreign occupation of, or mandate over" Iraq in the course of effecting regime change.