IRAQI PRESIDENT Ghazi Al-Yawar said on Tuesday it would be "complete nonsense" to ask US and other foreign troops to leave the country now.
But Yawar said US forces could start to leave by the end of the year and Iraqi army chief of staff General Abdel Hamid Zibari Babaqer said they could also be withdrawn from Iraqi cities within a year.
There are about 170,000 foreign troops in Iraq, with about 150,000 Americans.
Officials began the second-stage counting from national elections. Vote totals were being checked, then added up by computer after first tallies were completed by hand at polling stations nationwide and truckloads of ballots were shipped to Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.
Despite scattered clashes in rebel areas across the country, Iraq reopened its borders and commercial flights took off from Baghdad International Airport as authorities eased security restrictions imposed to protect the elections.
But Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq, whose leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had threatened voters with death in a bid to wreck the election, said on Monday it would pursue its war against US-led occupying forces and Iraqis working with them.
Two Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb on Tuesday in the northern Kurdish city of Arbil.
Guerrillas also released a videotape on Monday purporting to show they had downed a British military plane in a crash that killed 10 people on Sunday.
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President George Bush, pressed by Democrats for an exit strategy from Iraq, will not give a timetable for a US withdrawal but stress in his State of the Union speech the need to train Iraqi forces to take over security, the White House said on Monday.