Solver for XFEM

In the FEM book by KJ Bathe and also in the fem book by G.Dhatt, it is said the direct solvers are generally more convenient than iterative solvers and new versions of them include reordering and efficient use of skyline method. In contrast there are iterative solvers with capability to directly manipulate sparse format of matrices. I am now working on XFEM coding with C++ and don't know what type of solver would be the best for XFEM. the conditioning issues of matrices obtained from XFEM would be a difficulty for the choice of preconditioners.