BAGHDAD -- Iraqi soldiers and helicopter gunships were holding on Thursday after three days of battling Sunni militants for control of Iraq's largest oil refinery, but Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's fate was unclear as political leaders privately met to discuss his future, a Shiite lawmaker said.
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Government forces at the Beiji refinery were fighting to stop the momentum of the Sunni insurgency, which is led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and includes members of Sunni tribes and elements of Saddam Hussein's old Baath Party.
By late Thursday, the two sides held different parts of the refinery, which extends over several square miles of desert.
Meanwhile, al-Maliki's foes were engaging in secret talks to remove him.
Al-Maliki, who rose to office in 2006, when Iraq's sectarian bloodletting began to spiral out of control, quickly became known for a tough hand, working in alliance with American forces who were in the country after the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam.
Over the years that followed, Sunni tribes backed by the Americans rose up to fight al-Qaida-linked militants, while al-Maliki showed a readiness to rein in Shiite militiamen. By 2008, the violence had eased.
Since the withdrawal of American forces in late 2011, however, it has swelled again, stoked in part by al-Maliki himself.
The Iraqi leader's moves last year to crush protests by Sunnis complaining of discrimination under his Shiite-led government sparked a new wave of violence by militants, who took over the city of Fallujah in the western, Sunni-dominated province of Anbar and parts of the provincial capital Ramadi. Iraqi army and police forces battling them for months have been unable to take back most areas.
Shiite politicians familiar with the effort to remove al-Maliki said two names mentioned as possible replacements are former vice president Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a French-educated economist who is also a Shiite, and Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who served as Iraq's first prime minister after Saddam's ouster.
Abdul-Mahdi belongs to a moderate Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has close links with Iran.
Also lobbying for the job is Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite lawmaker who recently joined the Supreme Council and was a favorite of Washington to lead Iraq a decade ago. Another Shiite from the Supreme Council who is seeking the job is Bayan Jabr, a former finance and interior minister under al-Maliki's tenure, according to the politicians, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
President Barack Obama, who announced Thursday that he would send 300 military advisers to Iraq, declined to say whether he thought al-Maliki should go.
However, during the past two days the U.S. ambassador, Robert Beecroft, and Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official on Iraq and Iran, have met with Chalabi and with Osama al-Nujaifi, the outgoing Sunni speaker of parliament, according to people close to each of those factions.
"Brett and the ambassador met with Mr. Nujaifi yesterday, and they were open about this. They do not want Maliki to stay," Nabil al-Khashab, the senior political adviser to al-Nujaifi, said Thursday. "We will not allow a third term for the prime minister. They must change him if they want things to calm down."
Mohammed al-Khaldi, another aide to al-Nujaifi, said: "We have asked the Americans, Britain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran to work toward denying al-Maliki a new term. The Shiite bloc must find a replacement for him."
McGurk, in an email Thursday, denied that U.S. diplomats were trying to urge political leaders to form a coalition to choose a new prime minister.
"That is 100 percent not true," he said.
An Iraqi Shiite lawmaker, Hakim al-Zamili, said he was aware of a meeting in recent days between Iraqi political leaders and U.S. officials over the issue of al-Maliki's future, but he did not know who attended the meeting.
Al-Zamili belongs to a political bloc loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has publicly demanded that al-Maliki, in office since 2006, be replaced.
But al-Zamili indicated that he thought al-Maliki should be replaced only after Iraqi security forces beat back the Sunni militants who have taken over a vast chunk of northern Iraq in the past week.
"My view is that safeguarding Iraq is now our top priority," al-Zamili said. "We will settle the accounts later."
Aside from the Sunnis and Shiites, many of al-Maliki's former Kurdish allies also have been clamoring to deny the prime minister a third term in office, saying he has excluded them from a narrow decision-making circle of close confidants.
"We wanted him to go but after what happened last week we want it even more," said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician.
Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region, put the case against al-Maliki much more emphatically.
Without mentioning the prime minister by name, he said al-Maliki had discarded his counsel and he alone now "takes direct responsibility for what happened to Iraq."
Al-Maliki said this week that the newly elected parliament will meet within days to elect a new president who will in turn ask the leader of the chamber's largest bloc to form a new government. His State of the Law bloc won 92 of the chamber's 328 seats in the April 30 election. He needs a majority of at least 165 lawmakers to stay in power.
It took al-Maliki several months after the 2010 parliamentary elections to cobble together a government.
The prime minister has tried to downplay the sectarian nature of the fighting in his country, saying the militant threat affects all Iraqis regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation and called on Iraqis to drop all "Sunnis and Shiites" talk.
Al-Maliki also met Tuesday with Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political leaders. A statement issued after the meeting said they agreed to set aside differences and focus on "national priorities."
The ongoing crisis, al-Maliki said, had made Iraqis rediscover "national unity."
Despite the warm words, al-Maliki is not known to have made any concrete offers to bridge differences with the Sunnis or the Kurds, who have been at loggerheads with the prime minister over their right to independently export oil from their self-ruled region in the north and over territorial claims.
Meanwhile, a witness who drove past the Beiji oil facility Thursday said the militants manned checkpoints around it and hung their black banners on watchtowers. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals.
But one of the militants laying siege to the refinery confirmed by telephone that the facility remained in government hands, saying helicopter gunships slowed the insurgents' advance. The militant identified himself only by his alias, Abu Anas, and there was no way to verify his identity or location.
The army officer in charge of protecting the refinery, Col. Ali al-Qureishi, said by telephone that the facility remained under his control. He said his forces had killed nearly 100 militants since Tuesday.
A top Iraqi security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the refinery's workers were evacuated to nearby villages.
The facility's production accounts for just over a quarter of the country's entire refining capacity. It goes strictly toward domestic consumption for gasoline as well as fuel for cooking and power stations.
The gasoline largely goes to northern Iraq, and its closure this week has already caused a shortage there. In Irbil, a city controlled by ethnic Kurds, lines stretched for miles at gas stations as angry motorists shouted at one another.
"Everybody in Mosul and the Nineva province is coming to Kurdistan to fill up on gas," said a resident of a village near Mosul who gave his name as Mohammed. "And they don't have enough here."
It isn't clear what the insurgents would do if they fully captured Beiji. In Syria, the Islamic State has control of some smaller oil fields, but government air raids have limited their ability to profit from them. Militants have, however, refined oil into usable fuel products at primitive refineries.
As the fighting at Beiji continued, France's president held an emergency meeting Thursday to discuss possible military options for Iraq and Syria, after recent advances by Islamic extremists that have destabilized the region.
President Francois Hollande said in a statement afterward that France is "reinforcing cooperation with its international and European partners to bring a coordinated and effective response to the terrorist threat."
The statement didn't elaborate on what that response might be. A French diplomatic official said earlier Thursday that France has not been asked for military help in Iraq but was considering its options at Thursday's meeting, which was attended by several ministers, the chief of defense and the head of the French secret service.
The diplomatic official said any international military action in Iraq should be part of a broader political plan that includes Sunnis and Kurds. He didn't say what such action might entail, but said it would need to be more than drone strikes. The official was not authorized to be publicly named speaking of sensitive military issues.
France famously opposed the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq a decade ago, but has pushed for international action in Syria, a former French protectorate. France's government argues that the international community's failure to act more decisively in Syria led to the latest unrest in Iraq.
"The war that [Syrian President Bashar Assad] is pursuing against his own people promotes the creation of a zone between Syria and Iraq that is open to terrorists," Hollande said in the statement.
He urged the international community to boost support for Syrian opposition forces fighting jihadist groups, and said France is ready to help. He didn't elaborate.
Information for this article was contributed by Hamza Hendawi, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Diaa Hadid, Adam Schreck, Zeina Karam, Lara Jakes, Julie Pace, Sylvie Corbet and Jonathan Fahey of The Associated Press and by Alissa J. Rubin and Rod Nordland of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/20/2014