BAGHDAD, Iraq – Prodded by President Bush, Shiite negotiators today offered what they called their final compromise proposal to Sunnis Arabs to try to break the impasse over Iraq's new constitution, a Shiite official said.

Bush telephoned a key Shiite leader, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, on Thursday to urge consensus over the draft, Abbas al-Bayati told The Associated Press.

The Shiites were awaiting a response from the Sunnis, al-Bayati said.

He said the concessions were on the pivotal issues of federalism and efforts to remove former members of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party from public life, adding: "We cannot offer more than that."

There was no comment from Sunni negotiators. But in a sign of public opinion within the Sunni community, the country's Sunni vice president said the current draft was written only by Shiites and Kurds and is "far from the aspirations of all Iraqi people."

"We are trying to put forward the views of others," Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer, a former Iraqi president, told Al-Jazeera television Friday. "We want this constitution to maintain the unity of Iraqi soil and give rights to all Iraqis."

Al-Bayati said the Shiites had proposed that the parliament expected to be elected in December be given the right to issue a law on the mechanism of implementing federalism. He gave no further details.

The constitution provides for a federal state, one in which provinces would have significant powers in contrast to Saddam's regime in which Sunnis dominated a strong central government.

The charter will allow any number of provinces to combine and form a federal state with broader powers. The Sunnis have demanded a limit of three provinces, the number the Kurds have in their self-ruled region in the north. The Sunnis have publicly accepted the continued existence of the Kurdish regional administration within its current boundaries.

But without limits, Sunnis fear not only a giant Shiite state in the south but also future bids by the Kurds to expand their region, as they have demanded. That would leave the Sunnis cut off from Iraq's oil wealth in the north and south.

Al-Bayati said it will be up to the next parliament to set a timetable for the work of the Supreme National Commission for de-Baathification.

The Sunnis had insisted that the issue of dividing Iraq into federated regions be deferred until after the December parliamentary election. Many Sunnis boycotted the Jan. 30 election for the current parliament, which is dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

Sadoun Zubaydi, a Sunni member of the drafting committee, said the Sunnis would have to see the fine points of the Shiite proposal first. If the proposal does not make concessions on the principle of federalism but only the mechanism, this would not meet Sunni demands.

"Our position is that both the principle and mechanism should be deferred," Zubaydi told the AP. "Our policy is decentralization, but not political federalism with borders, division of resources, etc. That is separatism, not federalism."

The issue of federalism is complex, and some key Sunnis have taken a harder line against it than their negotiators. Some Sunni clerics have also condemned as anti-Islamic parts of the document their own negotiators have accepted.

"Don't follow constitutions of the infidels," influential Sunni cleric Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei told the congregation Friday at the Umm al-Qura mosque. "We don't want a constitution that brings the curse of separation and division to this country."

Al-Bayati and fellow Shiite negotiator Ali al-Adeeb, a Shiite member of the committee drafting the charter, said Bush telephoned al-Hakim after Shiites said the negotiations were deadlocked and the draft submitted Monday to parliament should go to the voters in the Oct. 15 referendum as is.

But bypassing the Sunnis would risk a backlash among the community at the core of the insurgency and which the Americans want to encourage to join the political process.

Al-Adeeb said U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad had also appealed to Iraq's powerful Shiite clergy, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to help resolve the standoff.

The White House confirmed that Bush made the call prior to the midnight Thursday deadline, but said there would be no comment on the latest compromise proposal.

Bush's call "reflects ... that this is an Iraqi process and that the United States is here to help them," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy said. Bush had urged that a consensus be found on the draft of a constitution.

With no sign of progress Thursday, Shiite officials said they believed talks were at a standstill and there was no legal requirement anyway to have parliament vote on a draft that was approved Monday by the Shiites and Kurds.

Following Bush's call, parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani announced officials would try again to reach unanimity Friday.

Al-Adeeb said al-Hakim told Bush the Shiite bloc was made up of several groups "and they might reject the constitution if the article on the Baath Party is removed."

That appeared to be a play for time to allow consultation with al-Sistani, who wields vast influence among Iraqi Shiites and whose tacit endorsement enabled al-Hakim's Shiite Alliance to win most of the 275 seats in January's election.

Shiites suffered under Saddam and hatred for the party runs deep. Al-Hakim himself lost many close relatives to Saddam's purges. A move by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, to quietly reinstate some former Baath members in the security services cost him considerable Shiite support, and his party fared poorly in the election.

Al-Sistani and the Shiites have bedeviled the Americans over the constitution issue since the early weeks of the occupation. The Bush administration wanted a constitution written as quickly and in 2003 suggested a panel of Iraqi legal experts draft it.

But the powerful al-Sistani decreed that no constitution written by unelected officials was acceptable, and the Americans dropped the idea.

U.S. officials then wanted the document written by an assembly whose members would be chosen in a series of regional caucuses. Al-Sistani objected to caucuses and that idea was dropped.

It is ironic that the Americans are urging the Shiites, who suffered terribly under Saddam, to make concessions over the purging of his allies. That suggests the Bush administration is eager for some kind of constitution as a sign of progress at a time of growing disaffection within the United States over the Iraq war.

The United States, hoping to lure Sunni Arabs away from the insurgency, had pressed the Shiites and Kurds to accept 15 unelected Sunni negotiators on the drafting committee last spring to ensure that the pivotal community was represented. Sunni Arabs form the core of the insurgency.

On Friday, about 5,000 people, some carrying Saddam's picture, rallied in the mostly Sunni city of Baqouba to protest the draft constitution. The rally was organized by the Iraqi National Dialogue Council, a Sunni group whose spokesman is a constitution negotiator.

Sunni Arabs said federalism, especially al-Hakim's demand for a Shiite mini-state in the south, remained the major obstacle. But they said the Kurds were unwilling to budge on that issue in order to protect their own self-ruled region in three northern provinces.

"Federalism is now the core issue. In light of Kurdish intransigence it makes it difficult to hope for a compromise," said Sadoun Zubaydi, a Sunni member of the drafting committee.

Sunni Arabs fear that federalism will lead to the breakup of Iraq and deprive them of oil wealth, concentrated in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north. Kurds and the majority Shiites bitterly recall decades of oppression at the hands of Saddam's Sunni-dominated dictatorship and believe federalism is the best way to prevent a repeat.

Although the constitution requires only a simple majority in the referendum, if two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces reject it, the charter will be defeated.

Sunni Arabs are about 20 percent of the national population but form the majority in at least four provinces. Sunni clerics have begun urging their followers to reject the charter in the referendum if Sunni interests are not served.

If voters reject it, parliament will be dissolved and elections held by Dec. 15 to form a new one. The new parliament then starts drafting a new constitution.

Associated Press correspondent Slobodan Lekic contributed to this report.