UNITED NATIONS, Sept 8: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on Tuesday that continued violence in Iraq could make it more difficult to hold successful elections in the country scheduled for January next year.

Calling for more efforts to convince the Iraqi people that they will eventually be the "masters of their own political future", Mr Annan in a report to the UN Security Council said that the UN remained a target for the insurgents.

So far, no country has responded to United Nations appeal for contributing troops for a UN protection force. The secretary-general said that the scale of recent fighting, coupled with assassinations and abductions across the country, was hampering economic and political initiatives by the interim government that took power on June 28 and was preventing an expansion of UN activities.

In addition, he said, "The pervasive sense of insecurity felt by Iraqi citizens as a result of extortion, kidnappings and other criminal activities has had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the capacity of political leaders to improve the security situation."

Insurgent groups and armed militias connected to key political parties continued to challenge the presence of the US-led multinational force and the new security forces of the interim government, Mr Annan said.

"In addition to severely disrupting everyday life for Iraqis, the ongoing violence could undermine confidence in the transitional political process, making it more difficult to create the conditions necessary for the holding of elections in January 2005," he said.

Mr Annan, who met his special representative for Iraq Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, said preparations for elections were facing two key challenges: building an electoral administration from scratch, especially at the local level, and at the same time meeting "the daunting logistical requirements for voter registration and polling, within a precarious security environment."

UN experts have determined that a completely new voter registration system isn't possible if elections are to go ahead in January so he said Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission had decided to use a system based on ration cards distributed under the UN oil-for-food programme as a starting point.