BAGHDAD President Barack Obama praised Iraqi moves to form an “inclusive” government on Friday, but the two-day-old deal was already looking fragile after Sunni lawmakers walked out of parliament, clouding the possibilities for working with Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Members of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc have accused al-Maliki's Shiite coalition of breaking promises under the deal, which aimed to overcome an eight-month deadlock and allow the creation of a new Iraqi government. Iraqiya lawmakers said they intended to press al-Maliki for explanations today.

Members of the Sunni minority said they feared they were being squeezed out of a major role in power, fearing the new government would just be a continuation of the last four years of Shiite dominance with a strong role for the Shiite parties' ally Iran.

“We support the withdrawal of the Iraqiya list members from the parliament session yesterday,” said Karim al-Obaidi, from the tribal council in Azamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. “We don't want to repeat what had happened before when the former government gave promises ... but didn't fulfill its obligations.”

The top cleric at one of Iraq's most important Sunni mosques said the power-sharing deal “copies the old sectarian and ethnic distribution of power and this brings us to square one.”

“We are expecting another four hard years,” the cleric, Abdul-Satar Abdul-Jabar, who is the imam of the Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiyah, told The Associated Press.

The agreement ironed out Wednesday forming a government made up of all Iraq's main ethnic and sectarian political groups paved the way for a parliament session Thursday in which the first steps were taken toward forming the new government. Lawmakers re-elected Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president, and he then asked al-Maliki to start putting together his coalition administration, a process that could take several weeks.