Glee and Anger Greet Iraq's Draft Charter

The draft defines Iraq as a federal union, affirming the Kurds' self-rule in the north and opening the way for creation of more federal regions elsewhere. Abdul Aziz Hakim, who leads one of the two Shiite religious parties spearheading the government, has called for creation of a sub-state in the oil-rich south, where Shiites dominate.

Hamoudi, the committee chairman, called federalism the only way to avoid the dictatorship he said would inevitably arise out of an oil-rich central government.

And in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, traditional wedding parties turned into street celebrations, with revelers waving posters for the new constitution.

Sunni negotiators and ordinary Sunnis, meanwhile, complained bitterly that the draft had been presented to parliament.

"I can say that Iraqis should have recited the prayer for the dead over the united Iraq this morning, after slaughtering it with this constitution," said Jassem Sarhan, a player on the Iraqi army's soccer team and a resident of Ramadi, in the area known as the Sunni Triangle.

North of the capital, in the heavily Sunni town of Dawr, roughly 1,000 demonstrators chanted for Hussein. "We refuse the term 'federalism,' " tribal leader Khairallah Khalaf Muhammed said. "We will fight federalism and whoever tries to force it."

Drafts of the constitution circulating after the midnight deadline indicated a deal had been reached over the northern city of Kirkuk. The drafts set a December 2007 deadline for removing hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were relocated to the oil-rich city during Hussein's rule and then holding a municipal election on whether the city should join the Kurdish region.

The constitution's treatment of Islamic law and of women also drew objections and a defense.

The draft says no law can contradict the principles of Islam and leaves it open for individuals to decide whether inheritance, divorce and marriage would be governed by religious or civil law. Opponents say those provisions threaten women's rights, potentially leaving them subject to the edicts of extremist clerics.

"Women, they lost hugely in this constitution," said National Assembly Chairman Hachim Hasani, a Sunni who represented the demands of women's groups during the constitutional debates.

"Women had more rights in the past regime than they had now," Hasani said.

Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador, called the constitution a balance between competing demands for wholly secular or wholly Islamic laws.

"Given the realities, I think where they have come out is right for Iraq at the present time," he said. Khalilzad, a Muslim born in Afghanistan, cited similarities with the constitution he helped draft for his native country, including a 25 percent quota for parliamentary seats for women.

"These are decisions Iraqis have made for themselves," he said. "We don't want to impose cookie-cutter approaches."

In Baghdad, some Iraqis took hope from even the limited consensus achieved.

"I don't think that things will get worse now, because the politicians are sitting together now," said Abdul Kareem Dhahi, 65, a mobile-phone shop owner. "So this is the new war, in politics. They will learn the game."

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.