Iraqi parliament on Monday postponed the vote over a draft bill allowing non-U.S. foreign troops to stay in Iraq until mid 2009, a source from the parliament said.
The delay came after the speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani ended Monday's session as a number of mainly Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers demanded the resignation of Mashhadani, the source said on condition of anonymity.
Lawmakers from the Shiite ruling United Iraqi Alliance UIA and the Kurdish coalition boycotted the session and held a meeting to take a final decision about Mashhadani, the source said.
The Iraqi state-run television of Iraqia reported that the parliament will hold an extra-ordinary session to discuss resignation of Mashhadani.
On Wednesday, Mashhadani closed a parliament session and threatened to resign angrily after chaos and arguments erupted in the parliament over the issue of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at the visiting U.S. President George W. Bush.
On Saturday, the Iraqi parliament rejected a draft law submitted by the government which stated that all foreign troops except for the United States to withdraw from Iraq by mid next year.
The lawmakers' rejection came after the first reading for a draft bill approved on Tuesday by the Iraqi cabinet.
The cabinet bill sets a timetable for withdrawal of non-U.S. foreign troops from Iraq by five months for combat troops startingfrom January and seven months for the rest of them.
If the parliament fails to issue a resolution about the presence of the non-U.S. foreign troops in Iraq before the UN mandate that expires on Dec. 31, those troops would have no legal ground to stay.
The cabinet draft was mainly to affect the roughly 4,000 British troops in southern Iraq.
However, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his visiting British counterpart Gordon Brown said in Baghdad on Wednesday thatthe British troops would end its mission in Iraq in the first halfof next year.
Source: Xinhua
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