Mint tea and turbans as East meets West in an Edgware Road hotel

Iraqi Muslim clerics in turbans and long robes nervously rubbed shoulders with surprised-looking women in off-the-shoulder dresses attending Christmas parties in a hotel on the Edgware Road in London yesterday as Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein held their largest meeting for years.

The mullahs, along with some 350 assorted Kurdish leaders, former generals, long-exiled party leaders, intellectuals, businessmen and mem- bers of the Iraqi diaspora, sipped mint tea in the coffee shop of the Hilton Metropole as they discussed the imminent fall of the regime in Baghdad.

The guerrilla leader Jalal Talabani, who rules one million people in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan, had swapped his normal Kurdish uniform of baggy trousers, cummerbund and turban for a neat Western suit to call on delegates to unite for the final overthrow of Saddam.

In the opening speeches party leaders, some of whom had made determined if unsuccessful efforts to kill each other in the past, were keen to put former differences behind them as they sensed that the regime in Baghdad was tottering. "For 30 years Iraqis have lived in a great prison," cried Sayid Mohammed Bahir al-Aloum, raising his hands to the audience. "Shame on you, Saddam!"

But from the first moments of the conference, already postponed twice because of internal wrangling and the difficulty of finding a place to hold it, there were signs of deep divisions. Just as delegates and the media were collecting their accreditation, the British public relations company retained by Ahmed Chalabi, controversial leader of the Iraqi National Congress, announced a press conference.

Many of the immense number of journalists in attendance thought this was the official opening. Rushing off to the King's Suite in the hotel, they discovered Mr Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, a noted Iraqi intellectual, presenting a weighty plan for "the building of a democratic system of government and a thriving civil society" in Iraq.

Mr Makiya, author of The Republic of Fear, a denunciation of Saddam published when the US, Britain and most of the rest of the world still supported him in his war with Iran, spoke eloquently of the virtues of his plan. But no sooner had he finished speaking than Hoshyar Zebari, a veteran Kurdish leader, his normally benign face frozen with anger at what he clearly saw as an attempt to hijack the meeting, appeared on the platform to announce: "The conference has not yet begun. These are just personal views."

This weekend's gathering stems from a meeting between the most powerful elements of the Iraqi opposition and the US State Department in Washington in August. The US wanted to show that a united opposition to Saddam existed, but did not want it to form a provisional government or do anything which could alienate serving Iraqi generals, who might mutiny once a war starts.

Massoud Barzani, leader of the powerful Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls western Kurdistan along with Mr Talabani, does not want to see the Kurds marginalised in any post-war settlement. But Mr Chalabi, with powerful friends on the Republican right in Washington, feared the London meeting was an attempt to take over leadership of the Iraqi opposition. The Americans, though supporting the conference, were keeping a low profile in the lobby of the hotel, in case their presence was seen as proof that they had organised the whole thing as a PR stunt to justify war. Some, clearly, had no doubt that it was, such as a group of chanting demonstrators outside the Metropole, held back by police.

Despite their evident divisions, there was euphoria among the delegates, some of them in exile for three decades, that they might just finally be going home. "Do you think the Americans are really going to do it?" asked one delegate edgily.

The conference is likely to produce a co-ordinating committee, one of whose tasks will be to work on a "common vision for Iraq's future". Speakers had good things to say yesterday about parliamentary government and federalism. Some privately denoun- ced the Byzantine manoeuvres of rival parties to take power next year in Baghdad. But others confessed that they could not think of anything beyond the immense fact of the imminent fall of Saddam.