The US overseer in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, and a delegation from his hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council will meet with a wary Annan in an effort to get the United Nations back into Iraq after a three-month absence.

Annan requested the meeting in mid-December to get "clarity" on what the world body would be expected to do as the US-led coalition prepares to formally end its occupation and Iraqis begin governing themselves on July 1.

But the talks have taken on new urgency for Washington in the wake of opposition from the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has rejected plans for the handover.

Annan, a vocal opponent of the war, will be asked for help from the same administration of US President George W. Bush that kept the United Nations at arm's length as it toppled Saddam Hussein and began to remake Iraq.

Sistani wants the democracy that the coalition promised after the war, and says direct elections must be held instead of the caucus system now being prepared to create a caretaker government in July.

He has already drawn tens of thousands of supporters onto the streets to protest putting an unelected government in power, and has threatened strikes and civil disobedience if the United States does not relent.

Bremer said Friday that Washington would consider some "refinements" to the plan, which was originally spelled out in a November 15 agreement between the Governing Council and the coalition.

That deal made no mention of the United Nations, which Annan ordered out of the country the previous month after two bombings at its Baghdad headquarters, one of which killed 22 people including the senior UN official in Iraq.

But in Baghdad, a Western official said that Annan had already agreed to send a team to Iraq to study Sistani's demands and that the details be hammered out Monday.

A UN spokesman on Friday did not confirm that a team would go, but a senior UN official played down high expectations of the meeting, calling it "a stage along a road."

A spokesman for the main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Governing Council member, would use the talks to press Sistani's request.

He said Sistani would back down only if a UN fact-finding team "officially concludes" that free and fair elections are impossible in the short-term, which Annan has indicated he believes.

"If this is the case, then His Holiness will present another option that is close to organising free elections," said the spokesman, Mohsen al-Hakim.

UN officials have not envisioned a major UN role in Iraq before July 1, and Annan has repeatedly said he is unwilling to risk the lives of more staff if the world body only has a sideline role and security does not improve.

But even work on a modest scale carries risks for the United Nations and for Annan, who says the world body is at a "fork in the road" in the aftermath of the Iraq war, which has seen UN personnel become the targets of deadly attacks.

A scathing inquiry into security lapses around the August 19 bombing of the UN offices that killed his top envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, pointed blame at some of the highest levels of the world body and damaged its credibility.

As Annan mulls his next move in Monday's talks, he is also expected to attend a separate meeting later in the day, where the Governing Council and the US-led coalition will brief the UN Security Council.

Current president Heraldo Munoz of Chile said last week that the council, which was sharply divided over the war, would feel "free" to raise questions about the plans for Iraq's future.