Afghanistan's first democratic elections are unlikely to take place in June as scheduled because of delays in voter registration, the United Nations said Thursday.
"The current rate of registration is far below the rate necessary to complete registration for election this year," UN spokesman Manuel de Almeida e Silva said.
"The right date remains June but it is close to impossible to meet the June date with the current security conditions which do not permit the registration to take place all over the country.
"It is necessary that registration teams have access to all areas of the country."
He said every effort was being made to make the deadline.
Rising violence in the south and east, which has increasingly targeted aid workers and reconstruction teams, has led to a drastic reduction in the number of foreign aid workers in the insurgency-hit regions.
So far 274,000 Afghans, of the 10 million eligible, have been enrolled on electoral lists and of these only 59,000 are women, Almeida e Silva said.
However, the number of women participating in the process is increasing gradually, he said.
President Hamid Karzai has already said that elections might be held up for two months for logistical reasons.
Under the Bonn peace accords, concluded at the end of 2001 following the ousting of the Islamic fundamentalist Taleban regime, elections were due to be held in Afghanistan in June following the adoption of a new constitution.
A grand assembly, or loya jirga approved a new constitution for the war-ravaged country on Sunday.