Asiacell was forced to sell some of its shares on the ISE as part of the terms of its licence from the government.

Asiacell, which is based in Sulaimaniyah city in Kurdistan region, competes against Zain Iraq, part of Kuwait's Zain,www.ekurd.net and Korek, an affiliate of France Telecom.

Asiacell began offering cell phone service in Iraq's highly autonomous northern Kurdistan region in 1999. Mobile phone services did not exist in the rest of Iraq until after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

The company now boasts nearly 10 million subscribers and says its network covers 97 percent of Iraq's population.

Meanwhile Qatar Telecom says it has increased its share in the Iraqi phone service provider Asiacell from 53.9 percent to 64.06 percent after a successful public offering for a quarter of the Iraqi company's shares.

Qtel chairman Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al-Thani said on Monday that Asiacell is "an outstanding business and has seen excellent performance" year after year.

Asiacell raised nearly $1.3 billion on Baghdad's small stock exchange Sunday in one of the region's biggest share offers in years. The sale more than doubled the market capitalization of the low-volume stock market from $4.7 billion to $9.65 billion.

Qtel is majority-owned by the Qatari government. It has more than 83 million customers in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

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