WASHINGTON — The American government is deadlocked on the issue of whether to allow five Iranians captured last Wednesday in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil to return home, according to three administration officials.

While the five individuals picked up in last week’s raid have been determined not to have diplomatic immunity, as Iran’s Foreign Ministry has insisted, it is still unclear whether Tehran might prevail in the standoff. The military has said those detained were members of Iran’s elite al-Quds force, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is in charge of anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism.

On one side of the bureaucratic debate are the CIA and the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. According to one administration official familiar with the debate, they argue that the prolonged detention of the suspected Quds force operatives will provoke a further escalation with Iran and scuttle the Iraqi government’s plan to help secure Baghdad with American soldiers. On the other side of the debate are the Pentagon’s special operations office, the Marines, and the Army — which have pleaded that the captured Iranians are too great a danger to American forces to return to Iran.

A group of suspected Quds force operatives carrying diplomatic credentials, who were captured in a December 21 raid at the compound of Iranian Shiite political leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, were allowed to return home earlier this year.

The outcome of the bureaucratic debate will be a good measure of the seriousness of the president’s new war strategy for Iraq. Last Wednesday, Mr. Bush pledged to interrupt terrorist supply lines originating in Iran and Syria, to disrupt attacks from terrorists supported by both countries, and to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

That policy has come under heavy fire from some Iraqi leaders. Yesterday, Mr. Hakim said, “Regardless of the Iranian position, we consider these actions as incorrect.”

Those words have echoed the position of Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari of Iraq, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, and President Talabani, who is a Kurd.

Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad yesterday predicted that the five Iranians, whom he insists are diplomats, will be freed within days. “The capture of Iranian diplomats is an insult to the Iraqi government and people,” Hassan Kazimi Qomi was quoted by the Associated Press as saying at a news conference in Baghdad yesterday. “Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told me that they will be released within days.”

A spokesman for the National Security Council yesterday declined to comment on the charge. But a final decision on what to do with the five suspected Quds force operatives will likely have to made by the White House. According to the New York Times, the president personally authorized last week’s raid in Irbil.

The Pentagon, the White House, and the Directorate of National Intelligence have not made public any of the new intelligence from either raids of Iranian outposts in Iraq. One intelligence official who has seen much of the early reporting on the Irbil raid said yesterday that it linked the Iranians to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army operations in Kirkuk as well as anti-Kurdish operations from Ansar al-Sunna. Ansar al-Sunna is an outgrowth of the defeated Ansar al-Islam, a Qaeda-affiliated Sunni organization that tried to assassinate one of Iraq’s deputy prime ministers, Barham Salih.

When another administration who confirmed this information was asked why Kurdish leaders would condemn a raid on an office supporting anti-Kurdish terrorism, this official said, “Watch their hands, not their mouths,” suggesting that behind the scenes, Kurdish leaders were not protesting so loudly.

Given the sensitivity of the raid, one possible option under consideration is holding the Iranians for a few more weeks and then releasing them quietly, when there is less attention being paid, to deprive Iran of a propaganda victory, the official said.