The blacklist of more than 500 names has sparked pre-election tensions between the country's Shiite majority and its Sunni Arab former elite, alarming the White House and the United Nations ahead of the March 7 vote.

Those barred include people accused of membership of Saddam's outlawed Baath party as well as the executed dictator's once deadly Fedayeen (Men of Sacrifice) militia and Mukhabarat intelligence division.

Amid an increasingly tense political atmosphere, President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, announced a judicial probe into the scrutiny committee that compiled the blacklist and handed it to election organisers last week.

"We asked in an official letter to judge Madhat al-Mahmud (president of the Iraqi Supreme Court) that he rule on the legality of the integrity and accountability committee," Talabani told reporters in Baghdad.

"Our question is: 'Is the organisation that took this decision legal?'"

Prominent Sunni Arab MPs have argued that the committee has no legal basis as it has not been approved by parliament.

Baath party membership was essential for obtaining a job and promotion in Iraq's omnipotent public sector during Saddam's regime.

But a process of de-Baathification was adopted by Washington diplomat Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, following the US-led invasion of 2003, which saw thousands of Saddam-era employees lose their jobs.

Talabani urged Iraqis to draw a distinction between hardcore Saddam loyalists and the many more who had joined the Baath party for pragmatic reasons.

"Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to join the party because membership was mandatory," he said. "We should not be unjust with them."

His comments, however, did not resonate in the mainly Shiite cities of Basra, Karbala and Najaf, where thousands of Shiites staged rallies to demand that the ban be upheld.

In the central shrine city of Karbala, around 4,000 people took to the streets.

In the shrine city of Najaf, farther south, hundreds marched and some held banners proclaiming: "Baathists and Nazis are two faces of the same coin," and "The return of the Baath is the return of attacks and prison."

The office of the radical Shiite and anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in Najaf, said in a statement he "firmly opposed" the "participation of the Baathists in the elections," as such a move was "unacceptable and illogical."

The demonstrations in Karbala and Najaf were organised by associations devoted to victims and prisoners of Saddam's Sunni Arab-dominated regime.

"We ask the Baghdad government and local authorities to punish the Baath and its representatives who continue to belong to the party," demonstrator Salah al-Mussawi told AFP in Najaf.

In the main southern city of Basra, there were around 1,000 protesters, including some who held banners reading "Shame on Baathists" and "The Baathists of yesterday are the MPs of today."

The integrity and accountability committee whose decision has inflamed the political climate six weeks from polling day is headed by Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi, who was deputy prime minister after the invasion.

Chalabi was a key US ally when he spearheaded the case for war against Saddam, which was launched on the grounds that the dictator had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

However, intelligence that Chalabi provided in support of those claims in the run-up to the invasion later turned out to be flawed and he subsequently fell out of favour with Washington.

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