Baghdad  - Official results from January's provincial elections in Iraq will be ready within two weeks, the country's electoral commission announced Monday.

"The deadline for the announcement of elections results will be two weeks from today," Faraj al-Haidari, the head of Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission announced on Monday. "But we will do our best to announce them even earlier than that."

Preliminary results on Thursday showed Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki's Dawlat al-Qanoon (State of Law) coalition ahead in Iraq's nine southern provinces.

In Sunni provinces, the Islamic Party, a successor to Iraq's Muslim Brotherhood, lost ground to secular Arab nationalist parties such as Salih al-Mutlaq's Iraqi National Project and the Awakening of Iraq, both of which have strong roots with Sunni tribal sheikhs.

In contested, ethnically-divided provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh, Sunni parties made big gains after largely boycotting the previous 2005 provincial council polls.

In Diyala, site of some of the worst battles between Sunni and Shiite militias in recent years, the Sunni Islamist Tawafiq bloc, led by Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi looked set to come out on top with a 21-per-cent showing.

And in Nineveh, the Sunni Arab nationalist Hadba list, founded to oust Kurdish parties from power, won 48.4 per cent of the vote, just shy of an absolute majority.

According to official figures, some 15 million Iraqis, or 51 per cent of those eligible, cast their votes for provincial councils in 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces on January 31.

Kurdish provinces and the disputed city of Kirkuk, which some Kurds hope will one day be the capital of an independent Kurdistan, did not vote in January. (dpa)