IRAQ is seeking to boost its sovereignty and business credentials by setting up its own internet domain name.

Officials from Baghdad want to claim the .iq tag and are in talks with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which assigns internet domain names.

In 1997 when Saddam Hussein was in power and internet access was blocked, the tag was granted to InfoCo, a Texas company that sold computers in the Middle East.

However, last year the company and the five Palestinian brothers running it were convicted of falsifying documents and making illegal shipments of computer equipment to countries the US says are sponsors of terrorism.

It is understood that, after the War in Iraq, Icann felt that the country was too unstable to take the “iq” name which it says is a “top level domain”.

But after talks with Icann Iraq is confident of claiming the name within weeks.

The country’s case has been helped by the intervention of Paul Bremer, former head of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

In April last year he told Icann that returning “iq” to Iraqis would “signal to investors that Iraq is rebuilding for a high-tech future”.

Iraq’s National Communication and Media Commission is about to announce the auction of at least three mobile phone licences. Next week it is to hold a mobile telecoms conference in London to drum up interest for the licences, which will replace licences issued by the occupation authority in 2003.

At present, only 3 per cent of the country’s 26 million people have fixed landlines and about 1.8 million people have mobile phones.

Analysts estimated that within three years the number of people with mobile phones will have risen by five million.

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