"Parliament has decided to put back the referendum on the regional constitution until a date yet to be fixed," Adnan al-Mufti told AFP.

The plan to include ethnically diverse Kirkuk province and parts of Nineveh and Diyala provinces in official Kurdish territory had angered Iraq's Arab and Turkmen communities.

Mufti said a new date for the vote will be set by Kurdish president Massud Barzani in consultation with parliament.

Mahmud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament, said the referendum is likely to be postponed for a few months.

"I think it will be delayed by two or three months because people cannot go to the ballot box in July (for regional elections) then again in August" for the referendum, he said.

Iraq's electoral commission on July 6 ruled out holding the referendum on the same day as the July 25 parliamentary and presidential polls and proposed delaying it until mid-August.

Last month, the text of the draft constitution was approved by 96 of the regional assembly's 111 MPs representing constituencies in three Kurdish provinces.

The vote prompted Turkmen residents of Kirkuk to seek approval from central government for the right to arm themselves for self-defence.