The United States and Britain are drawing up a “timeline” for Iraqis to take over their country’s security after elections due on Sunday, Prime Minister Tony Blair says. Blair, who is Washington’s staunchest ally in Iraq, would not put a date on the withdrawal of foreign troops, but said swathes of the country were ready to be handed over to Iraqi security forces.

The US and British governments were looking with the Iraqis at “timelines for the Iraqiisation” (of the security forces) to be achieved”, he told the Financial Times in an interview yesterday.

“There are areas where we would be able to hand over to those Iraqi forces,” he told the paper. “Remember, 14 out of the 18 provinces in Iraq are relatively peaceful and stable.” Blair signalled that Britain, which has 9,000 soldiers in Iraq, and the United States, which has 150,000, were working with their Iraqi counterparts to consider a new approach to security.

They have been faced with a mounting insurgency in the run-up to the January 30 elections. “What we have got to do ... is to get beyond simply taking (the insurgents) on a daily basis,” Blair said.

“Both ourselves and the Iraqis want us to leave as soon as possible. “The question is what is ‘as soon as possible’? And the answer to that is: when the Iraqi forces have the capability to do the job.”

Talk of a pullout timetable could give Blair a boost as he prepares to call a general election, widely expected to take place in May.

But the US government said in a report earlier this month the fledgling Iraqi security forces had had mixed results against insurgents. A group headed by one of the insurgent leaders, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, made a call last week for Islamists to prepare for a lengthy holy war. The group, which has declared a “bitter war” on Iraq’s elections, has carried out most of the deadliest suicide attacks in the run-up to the voting.

Sunday’s election for a national assembly has divided Iraq, with most of the 60 percent Shi’ite majority strongly backing the polls. The vote is expected to cement Shi’ite political dominance after decades of oppression under former president Saddam Hussein. But the insurgency raging in Iraq’s Sunni Arab regions has disrupted election preparations.

Blair said the violence did not represent the whole of the Sunni population, which forms a minority in Iraq. “If the insurgents — or terrorists — stopped, would you have a Sunni boycott of the elections? No, you would not, they would be voting, and that is why they are doing it. “But the idea it represents, you know, the whole of the Sunni population, I think it really would be a gross misjudgement.”