“There is no possibility to pass it in the Parliament because there are no sessions in this week or next week,” Abbas al-Bayati, a member of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa Party, said before a meeting of the political leaders from different blocs. “So discussions will continue until the end of this month.”

Image Sergey V. Lavrov said Russia would support an Iraqi effort to retain the U.S.-led force. Credit... Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

For the second time in a week, the Iraqi government explicitly criticized the Americans for public comments about the agreement. Ali al-Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman, said in a statement that the government was concerned about comments by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who warned on Tuesday that the Iraqi military was not prepared to defend the country from insurgents and foreign forces on its own.

Mr. Dabbagh’s reproof came just days after he chided Gen. Ray Odierno for suggesting that Iran had tried to bribe Iraqi officials to vote against the proposed pact. General Odierno, the commander of United States and allied forces in Iraq, made the suggestion in an interview with The Washington Post.

Mr. Maliki met on Wednesday with representatives of Iraq’s Christian sects, assuring them that the armed extremists who had been driving Christians from their homes in Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, would be punished. About half the Christian population in Mosul  2,270 families, according to Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights  has fled this month in response to escalating threats and killings.

Mr. Maliki also promised that the government would protect the Christians remaining in Mosul and that it would offer Christians a larger role in the security forces that protect their neighborhoods. His office had earlier pledged cash payments of about $860 to every Christian family that returned to Mosul.

Few took up the government on its offer, but an official in Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry announced Wednesday that the flight of Christians from Mosul had ceased.

In Mosul on Wednesday, a car bomb killed four people and wounded three others.

And near the border with Syria, Iraqi officials reported having found mass graves containing the remains of 34 people, according to The Associated Press. The bodies were believed to be those of Iraqi Army recruits from Karbala who were killed by gunmen from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.