BAGHDAD — Iraq’s foreign minister said today that the country has little choice but to sign a new security agreement with America that would let American troops stay in the country after a U.N. mandate expires.

The foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, recently returned to Iraq after meeting with President Bush at Washington to discuss the agreement, which has been criticized by many Iraqi officials worried it would leave too much power in American hands.

But Mr. Zebari told parliament that the only other options were to extend the U.N. mandate that expires at the end of the year or continue without a formal agreement, neither of which holds much appeal to Iraqis.

He said an agreement would last one or two years and urged Iraqi officials to finalize it by the end of July.

Meanwhile, a truck bomb planted near the house of a Sunni sheik who had turned against al-Qaeda killed one person and wounded 25 others near the northern city of Mosul today, a police spokesman at Niniveh province, Brig. Khalid Abdul-Sattar, said. He said Sheik Abdul-Razaq al-Waqaa was among the injured.

Militants also killed seven people in a series of attacks today at Iraq’s eastern Diyala province, and a local official said government crackdowns against Sunni extremists elsewhere in the country were driving them back to the area.

Prime Minister al-Maliki has launched operations against Shiite and Sunni militants at Baghdad and Mosul in recent months.