Baghdad, Iraq ? They marched by the tens of thousands for hours and hours, waving banners, shouting slogans and proudly carrying photographs of the man they called their inspiration — Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

“All the people are with you, Sayyed Ali,” demonstrators chanted Monday as part of the rapidly growing movement to reject the U.S. plan to turn over its control to Iraqis on July 1 without direct elections.

The march, stretching for miles through crowded Baghdad streets, was the largest demonstration by backers of the 73-year-old religious leader who says the only way to ensure democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime is for Iraqis to promptly elect their own leaders.

The United States and its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council disagree, saying the situation in Iraq is too chaotic and that there’s no system in place to carry out an election.

Several Governing Council members and Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, met Monday with U.N. officials in New York, seeking U.N. help in convincing al-Sistani and others that direct elections cannot be held any time soon.

Afterward, Secretary General Kofi Annan said he would consider whether to send a team to Iraq to assess the feasibility of early elections.

“I don’t believe there may be enough time between now and May to hold elections, but the team will go down and look into that further and then report to me,” he said at a U.N. news conference Monday.

Under a complex plan that the United States developed to meet Iraqis’ demands for an end to the occupation, a series of caucus-like elections is slated to choose an interim authority that will rule until full elections are held in 2005. The United States intends to hand over control to the Iraqis by July 1.

But resistance to the U.S. plan has been stoked higher almost daily by Shiite clerics and politicians, who say they are speaking on behalf of the reclusive religious leader.

The rally overshadowed the arrival of the first contingent of Japanese forces in Iraq. The 30-person engineering unit crossed from Kuwait to a Dutch military camp about 140 miles south of Baghdad. In a controversial decision, Japan’s leaders decided to send up to 1,000 soldiers to serve in rescue and humanitarian roles. They are due to be fully deployed by March

Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims march in Baghdad carrying portraits of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and other Shiite clerics. The crowd marched peacefully Monday to demand an elected government.

Japan’s involvement is a victory for Washington’s effort to show that major allies, and not just smaller nations, are taking part in rebuilding Iraq. Even the lingering violence took a temporary backseat on Monday for many to the fact Sistani has become the most important political player in Iraq.

“Al-Sistani has become chairman of the governing council,” recently said Barham Salih, prime minister of the part of northern Iraq ruled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “He’s the unelected authority.”

Appeal to Shiites

Al-Sistani, a revered Iranian-born Islamic scholar, spent years under house arrest in Najaf in southern Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s regime. He reportedly has not left his house since the regime’s fall, and does not meet with the news media. Through his speeches or spokesmen, the frail, white-haired cleric has not spelled out what kind of government he would like to see in Iraq, except that the nation’s leaders must be chosen by Iraqis — “not those who came from abroad.”

The ayatollah has appealed to Shiites’ sense of loss, reminding them how they rose up in the 1920s against the British only to be made subservient first to the British, and then to Sunni Iraqis.

Iraq’s Shiites, who account for about 60 percent of the 24 million Iraqis, were relentlessly persecuted by Saddam Hussein, their leaders assassinated, and thousands tossed into mass graves. But their grief goes back longer to centuries of living under others’ rule in a land that they consider sacred.

After meeting with al-Sistani recently, Adnan Pachachi, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council, described him as a reasonable man willing to compromise. He came away feeling, he said, that al-Sistani might accept a process that is broader and more open than the one the United States proposed.

Iraqis lie down in the street in Baghdad carrying an Iraqi flag and portraits of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani and other Shiite clerics. Monday, tens of thousands marched peacefully to demand an elected government.

Hope and faith

After speaking to marchers at Monday’s rally, Sadaoun al Dulame, a social researcher, concluded that many were not drawn to al-Sistani’s cause for religious reasons, but rather in the hope that elections might solve Iraq’s many problems.

“They think that if elections are held, they will escape this very horrible period,” he explained.

But that is not what many of the marchers said as they paraded in the bright warm sunshine holding aloft banners in every color, and many photographs of Sistani.

“He is just like the pope. Sayyed al-Sistani is our leader,” shouted Abed Darham, 35.