The two main Kurdish parties in northern Iraq called Tuesday for a major meeting of the leading opposition movements in Baghdad to prepare an interim administration.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani issued a statement after a meeting Monday night urging a leadership council set up in February to attend.

The council, on which Barzani and Talabani both sit, was created during a meeting of major opposition groups in Kurdish-held northern Iraq.

The statement set no date for the talks intended to prepare for an interim government and called on all factions to turn up.

Former Iraqi foreign minister and opposition figure Adnan Pachachi said in Kuwait on Saturday that he hoped a broad-based conference would be held in Baghdad soon to elect an interim authority to put war-ravaged Iraq on the path to free elections.

Pachachi, who opposed the US-led war and favoured a provisional UN administration to maintain law and order, said he was not considering being part of any interim government but preferred to help convene the conference.

He was the only Sunni Muslim offered a seat on the council. The others were from the majority Shiite Muslim, and Kurdish communities.

But Pachachi spurned the offer.

He went on instead to rally liberal Iraqi "independents," announcing the birth of Independent Iraqis for Democracy at a conference attended by some 300 Iraqi exiles in the British capital last month - Sapa-AFP