Baghdad  - Iraq's President Jalal al-Talabani said on Wednesday that talks about reshaping the Iraqi government were progressing and he hoped there would be a new cabinet within a week.

Talabani said that he plans to meet with Vice-President Tarek al- Hashimi and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to discuss the possibility of including ministers from the Iraqi Accord Front, the country's largest Sunni bloc, in the new cabinet.

"National unity can not be achieved without the presence of the Sunni brothers," Talabani told reporters in a press conference, marking the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

He added: "I hope that ministers of the Iraqi Accord Front would return quickly to the cabinet, because the three focal points of a united government are the Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and the Kurds."

Talabani said he hoped that the move would be achieved within one week.

Iraq's premier has been promising to reshape his cabinet since the Iraqi Accord Front, and the Shiite Sadr bloc withdrew from it in July.

The shaky coalition cabinet was shattered even further by the withdrawal of ministers from smaller blocs, which left it with 15 empty ministerial seats, most of them from the Accord Front and Sadr bloc.

Also on Wednesday, Talabani described the Sadrist movement as "respectful."

He told reporters that many steps forward had been taken to resolve the conflict between the government and the Shiite movement of al-Sadr.

"We hope that the Sadrist movement would respond to requests that demand the dissolution of the Mahdi army and that they work as a respectful political movement," Talabani said.

The government launched on March 25 an offensive targeting mainly al-Sadr's militiamen in Basra but halted military operations after al-Sadr moved to halt fighting.(dpa)