In an illustration of the size of the task they face, 11 members of a single Shia family had their throats slit in an attack south of Baghdad. Police said insurgents had warned the family to move out of their largely Sunni neighbourhood.
With Sunni politicians angry about the election results and Shias seeking to press home their advantage after dominating the December 15 poll, the meeting between Shia leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and President Jalal Talabani in the Kurdish mountain resort of Dukan had been billed as a key encounter.
"Among the things we discussed was the possibility of getting others involved in forming the next government," Hakim told a news conference afterwards.
Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq sits in a Shia Islamist coalition that appears to have dominated the vote. The coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, wants to press on with forming a government and has insisted it should choose the next prime minister.
But Sunni and secular politicians say the election was fixed and have demanded a rerun. Tens of thousands of angry Sunnis have marched through cities across Iraq to contest the vote.
Iraq's Electoral Commission insisted again on Thursday the election was largely fair, and that while isolated cases of fraud might result in cancellation of a few ballot boxes, that will not affect the overall result. The United Nations agrees.
In a statement, the commission also rejected accusations of bias. "The allegations levied against (the commission) concerning the elections are not true," it said.
Perhaps sensing a rerun is now out of the question, some Sunni Arab leaders scaled back their demands on Thursday, saying they would be satisfied with a UN review of the results, which have yet to be officially confirmed.
The leaders said they planned to travel to Kurdistan to join the ongoing discussions -- but only to discuss the election results, not the shape of the future government.
"There will be no negotiations about forming the new government," said Hussein al-Falluji, a leading member of the biggest Sunni coalition, the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF).
"We will not have any dialogue about it, not with the Kurds and not with the Shias. Results should be reviewed and announced first."
Hakim opened a new stage in talks on Tuesday by meeting Kurdish regional leader Masoud Barzani in his stronghold of Arbil before heading to Dukan at the head of a 20-strong Shia delegation to meet Talabani, the other main Kurdish leader.
Before entering the meeting, Hakim reiterated his pledge to seek a national unity government to satisfy all Iraq's sects and ethnic groups, including the 20-percent Sunni Arab minority.
Sunnis had hoped their participation in the December 15 election would give them a powerful voice in the new legislature. But, outnumbered about three to one by Shias who appear to have voted largely along sectarian lines, they face the prospect of being marginalised again, albeit to a lesser degree.
Provisional results suggest the Sunni IAF will have some 40 seats in the new 275-seat assembly to 130 for the Shia Alliance. The Kurds, headed by Talabani, look to have around 50 seats while the broad secular alliance led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has around 25.
As Talabani and Hakim met in the calm of the Kurdish mountains, violence persisted elsewhere.
In the latest of several overtly sectarian attacks, six assailants broke into a house just south of Baghdad and killed 11 members of the same Shia family by slitting their throats.
A suicide bomber killed four policemen and wounded five when he blew himself up at a checkpoint near the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, and a police chief was seriously wounded in a gun attack near Falluja.
In Paris, the French government urged a little-known Iraqi militant group to release French engineer Bernard Planche, abducted in Baghdad in early December.
The appeal came a day after Dubai-based Al Arabiya television broadcast a video it said came from the group, the "Surveillance for the Sake of Iraq Brigade". The video showed militants pointing rifles at the head of a man who identified himself as Bernard, without giving a surname.
The al Qaeda network in Iraq also issued a video showing foreign hostages -- five Sudanese embassy staff, including a diplomat. A statement with the video demanded Khartoum cut ties with Baghdad within 48 hours. Al Qaeda has killed several foreign hostages over the past two years, including diplomats.