Donna Leinwand reports in USA Today that Siyamend Othman, chairman of Iraq's National Communications & Media Commission, wrote to ICANN on 20 May to request re-delegation of the .iq top-level country domain. He called the transfer "an important tangible and symbolic milestone for this nation, as well as the freedom and hopes of the Iraqi people..." Afghanistan's application for the .af domain - which ICANN took 6 months to process - apparently was the model for Iraq's.
According to an article last year in Wired News, "Records on file with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority...show that dot-iq was delegated in 1997 to InfoCom of Richardson, Texas. In December 2002, the United States indicted the four Elashi brothers who run InfoCom on charges of providing financial support to Hamas, a Palestinian fundamentalist movement known for its suicide bombings. Three of the men are currently being held in a Texas prison."
ICANN still lists InfoCom as the domain administrator, but last autumn two other people - one living in Los Angeles, the other in Stockholm - claimed to be the manager of the .iq domain in competing applications to join the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO).