KABUL (Reuters) - The United Nations has begun registering the first of an estimated 10.5 million Afghans expected to vote in their volatile country's first free elections next year. The registration process began in the southern city of Kandahar on Sunday and was extended to seven other cities, including Kabul, on Monday, said Catarina Fabiansson, spokeswoman for the UN election office in Afghanistan.

All Afghans aged over 18 by June 20, 2004, are qualified to register to elect a national president in the elections, which are due to be held next June.

Fabiansson said the speed of the $78 million registration project in a country devastated by more than two decades of war and still riven by factional, ethnic and religious strife, would be dictated by the availability of donor funds and by security.

Given Muslim sensitivities, especially in the more conservative south where the ousted Taliban launch hit-and-run attacks and are showing signs of regrouping, there will be separate registration sites for men and women.

Fabiansson said most of those to register initially will be the 19,000 district representatives who have the job of electing a Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly, due to meet from December 10 to approve a new constitution.

Ordinary people would have the chance to register in the towns of Bamiyan and Herat, and general registration would be extended to other cities in coming weeks.

Fabiansson said the project would be extended to the provinces, then to villages and was expected to be completed by early 2004. DANGER TO REGISTRATION STAFF

UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said the United Nations hoped the phased registrations would decrease the exposure of registration staff to danger.

The head of the UN electoral office, Reginald Austin, told Reuters earlier this year that taking Afghanistan to the polls would be an enormous task.

Austin has already had to pare back an original budget of $130 million and Western countries have been reluctant to provide troops needed to expand an international peacekeeping force to unruly provinces plagued by factional fighting, and attacks by Taliban guerrillas and allied Islamic militants.

On Monday, the U.S. military, leading the hunt for Taliban and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan, said it had established a new military reconstruction team in Herat, a western province considered one of the most stable in the country.

It is the sixth team of its kind after others in Bamiyan, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif, Gardez and Parwan. Both Washington and NATO have hailed the program as the way to bolster provincial security.

However, they have been criticized by aid groups and the United Nations for deploying forces in some of the safest parts of the country, while neglecting wide areas of the south, where essential humanitarian work has been halted for lack of protection for aid workers.