TEHRAN, 27 January 2005 — Close to 280,000 Iraqi nationals living abroad have registered to vote in this weekend’s Iraqi elections, organizers of the out of country voting operation said yesterday.

Iran’s Iraqi community provided for the largest number of enrolments, with 60,908 registering in six Iranian cities.

The head of the Iraq out-of-country voting program in Iran, Kate Pryce from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said she was “extremely pleased” with the figure for Iran.

The organization was working on an estimate that there were between 100,000 and 120,000 eligible Iraqi voters in Iran, meaning the registration figure of 60,908 represented between 50 and 60 percent of them.

In other countries, however, Iraqi emigres appeared to have shown scant interest in registering to vote or had difficulties traveling the long distances to register.

Pryce said the global registration figure was around 280,000 for all the 14 countries were polling facilities will be available: Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iran, Jordan, The Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United States. This compares to initial expectations of up to one million enrolments.

The nine-day registration period ended late Tuesday, with voting for exiled Iraqis due to take place tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday.

IOM said there were no security problems during the registration process in Iran.

“We are working extremely closely with authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There were no incidents or disruption during the registration process, and we have to thank them for that,” Pryce said.

She said despite shortcoming in the operation — notably that IOM was only mandated for the task by the Iraqi electoral commission two months ago — the organization “had the capacity to register as many people as was possible.”

The voting operation in Iran has also come under criticism: One of Iraq’s main Shiite parties, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has complained of a lack of polling stations set up by the IOM.

SCIRI has complained that at least 40,000 Iraqis will have no access to the vote given the absence of polling centers in the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz, Yazd and the western province of Ilam.

The Iranian city of Qom, just south of Tehran, saw a total of 21,608 Iraqis enroll, closely followed by the capital with 20,193.