International New York Times - BAGHDAD

BY TIM ARANGO AND SUADAD AL-SALHY

Iraq's leaders on Thursday selected Fouad Massoum, a longtime Kurdish politician and former guerrilla fighter who took up arms against Saddam Hussein's government, as the country's new president, an important step in forming a new government that the international community and Iraq's religious authorities have called for and that is described as crucial to confronting a growing Sunni insurgency.

Mr. Massoum, 76, replaces Jalal Talabani, who has been president since 2005 and was seen as a rare unifying figure among Iraq's many factions but has been largely absent from the political scene since suffering a stroke in late 2012. The Kurds settled on Mr. Massoum after a late-night meeting Wednesday in Baghdad. After two rounds of voting in Parliament on Thursday, Mr. Massoum received 211 votes out of 269 cast and was immediately sworn in.

The next political step, the selection of a new prime minister, will be more difficult and fraught, especially as violent attacks are killing civilians on a daily basis and Sunni militants led by the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, are consolidating their control of large parts of the north and west of Iraq. That process will determine the future of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal alMaliki, who has been in power since 2006 but who has become an increasingly polarizing figure as the insurgency has grown, setting off new rounds of sectarian violence.

Mr. Maliki has insisted that he will seek a third term as prime minister, but it appears increasingly unlikely that his efforts to remain in power will succeed. American officials, who believe Mr. Maliki has become too divisive to lead Iraq out of its current crisis, have been working behind the scenes to push Iraq's leaders to select someone else.

Other powerful factions appear arrayed against Mr. Maliki, as well. Iran, which exerts enormous influence here, has signaled that it would like to see new leadership, as have Iraq's powerful Shiite religious leaders and other political factions, Sunnis and Kurds but also many among the Shiite majority.

Before the vote for president, Ban Kimoon, the secretary general of the United Nations, appeared at a news conference in Baghdad and said, "Iraq is facing an existential threat, but it can be overcome through the formation of a thoroughly inclusive government - a government that can address the concerns of all communities, including security, political, social and economic matters."

Mr. Massoum's rise to the presidency comes a week after Parliament elected Salim al-Jubouri, a moderate Sunni Islamist, to the position of speaker, which was the first step in foming a new government after national elections in April. The selection of Mr. Massoum, who holds a doctorate in Islamic philosophy and helped draft Iraq's new Constitution after the American-led invasion, was seen as another important step in establishing a new, inclusive government.

"This is for sure a great achievement," said Hashim al-Hashimi, a political analyst. "Now the road is paved to nominate the prime minister and form the government."

He said Mr. Massoum and the new speaker were "well known and acceptable by everyone inside the political process and outside."

Under an informal political bargain forged after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Iraqi presidency is held by a Kurd, the speaker of Parliament is a Sunni Arab and the position of prime minister, the most powerful post, goes to a Shiite.

As if to emphasize the challenges the country faces, hours before Parliament voted on the presidency on Thursday, an attack on a convoy of prisoners near Baghdad left more than 60 people dead. And in Mosul, the country's secondlargest city, ISIS militants ordered all girls and women in around the area to undergo female genital mutilation, Reuters reported. Jacqueline Badcock, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said in the Kurdish city of Erbil that the requirement was a "grave concern" and could affect as many as four million people, according to Reuters.

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said that at least 255 prisoners in six Iraqi cities had been executed in recent weeks.

Marwa Salman contributed reporting