Baghdad - Iraqi Kurds would make "no concessions whatsoever" on voting in the disputed city of Kirkuk, a Kurdish lawmaker said Monday, as the Iraqi parliament prepared to meet again.

"The Kurdistan Alliance Bloc will not make any concessions whatsoever on voting in ... Kirkuk," Kurdish member of parliament Adil Barwari told the Kurdish news agency AKNews.

"We insist on holding elections in a timely fashion, with the rest of the country," he said. "Any proposal to postpone the elections will not be accepted."

Rancorous debate over voting in the northern city has repeatedly derailed a vote on a law to cover voting in parliamentary elections now scheduled for January 16. The question was left off the agenda for Thursday and Sunday's parliamentary sessions after lawmakers failed to reach a consensus position.

Since the law must be in place 90 days before voting begins, a January 16 vote appears less and less likely as the impasse continues.

Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make Kirkuk, and its nearby oilfields, the capital of a future independent state, calling it their "Jerusalem." Arab and Turkmen politicians view the city and surrounding al-Tamim province as integral parts of Iraq.

Kurdish lawmakers back a UN proposal that would see Kirkuk vote with the rest of the country, using 2009 voter registration rolls that show a marked rise in the number of Kurdish voters. Arab and Turkmen politicians look with suspicion at the rise in Kurdish voters, and want 2004 rolls used instead.

Neither side has shown any indication it will back down. Lawmakers said a new UN proposal aimed at breaking the deadlock proposes granting a compensatory seat to the Arab and Turkmen parties that win the highest percentage of the vote in the event Kurdish candidates sweep the election, and making election results provisional until voter rolls for Kirkuk could be examined.

Barwari on Monday said Kurdish lawmakers would reject that proposal.

Omar al-Juburi, a member of the Arab Political Council of Kirkuk, said Arab and Turkmen lawmakers would hold a closed meeting to formulate their stance on the new UN proposal.

"The Kurds have rejected all previous proposals that we have backed," he said.

"We have made our position clear," Sheikh Abdel-Rahman Manshid al- Assi, another member of the Arab caucus, said late last week. "We will not relinquish Kirkuk ... It is up to the Kurds to make concessions."

Kirkuk was left out of previous elections after lawmakers failed to come to a formula for counting the region's votes. But Massoud Barzani, president of northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, has said that the Kurds will not accept any solution that gives Kirkuk "a special status" in the 2010 polls.

Iraqi lawmakers have been seeking a consensus solution to the issue for fear that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself an ethnic Kurd, might veto an election law passed over Kurdish objections. (dpa)