DIWANIYAH  - The US military's handover to Iraqi forces of security control for the Shia province of Diwaniyah, due to take place on Monday, has been cancelled, officials told AFP. Sheikh Ghanim Abid Dahash, spokesman for Diwanyiah provincial council, said the transfer has been postponed "indefinitely because there is no coordination between the central government and the US forces." Dahash gave no details but the US military and the Polish defence minister said the transfer had been cancelled due to bad weather. "The event was delayed today due to weather. It was not postponed due to any other reason," said military spokesman Lieutenant David Russell. Since early on Monday Baghdad has been hit by a sandstorm which grounded most military flights. "The sandstorm has cut all communication with Baghdad," said Polish defence minister Bogdan Klich who arrived on Sunday in Diwaniyah to attend the ceremony. "We are here and ready but unfortunately no Iraqi government official or US official could come," he told Polish television network TVN24, adding the Iraqis decided to cancel the event. He said the handover may now take place in early July. The Polish military has some 900 troops in Iraq as part of the US-led coalition which invaded Iraq in March 2003. Most of them are deployed in central and southern Iraq. Klich earlier this month said that his troops would be out of Iraq by the middle of October after handing over Diwaniyah to the Iraqis. Diwaniyah, formerly known as Qadisiyah, was to be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces to be taken over by local forces from US-led foreign troops, amid a push to transfer security control of the entire country back to Baghdad. More than five years after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, security in nearly half of Iraq's 18 provinces is still in the hands of US-led forces. The nine provinces which have been handed over to the Iraqis are Maysan, Muthanna, Basra, Dhi Qar, Najaf, Karbala, and the three Kurdish provinces of Dohuk, Sulaimaniyah and Arbil. Diwaniyah has often been rocked by infighting as rival Shia militias vie for supremacy. The province has seen fierce clashes between supporters of anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his rival Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. Last November, Iraqi and US troops launched a major military assault in Diwaniyah to stabilise the region of around one million people. More than 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen supported by tanks and hundreds of US and Polish troops took part in the assault to flush out Shia militants from the province's capital. Nearly 100 militants were detained during the operation, many of them loyal to Sadr.