Hundreds of angry protesters hurled stones at provincial council offices in southern Iraq Monday, wounding 14 police amid growing rage over power rationing in the summer heat, a police official said.

The police, who included a lieutenant colonel, were all admitted to hospital after the frenzied protest outside the Dhi Qar provincial headquarters in the city of Nasiriyah , the official said.

The provincial council posted pictures of the protest and ensuing clashes on its website, showing serried ranks of riot police with shields deployed outside the concrete and razor-wire perimeter of the headquarters compound.

Police and demonstrators alike were armed with sticks.

As the protest turned angry and volley after volley of stones rained down on officers, police resorted to water cannons to disperse the crowd.

Fellow officers detained a police captain after he joined the protesters, an official said.

The demonstrators, who gathered in response to a call from Shiite clerics, carried banners demanding the dismissal of Electricity Minister Karim Wahid and provincial officials, an AFP correspondent said.

Anger has been growing over rationing that sees Iraqis receive power for just one hour in five in temperatures that have been topping 50 degrees Celsius across the center and south of the country for days.

On Saturday, police opened fire to disperse a similar protest outside provincial council offices in the main southern city of Basra , killing one demonstrator and wounding two, an army commander told AFP.

In an interview with AFP earlier Monday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari warned the Basra protest could be a harbinger of more trouble as prolonged "bickering" over who should be Iraq 's next prime minister sparks mounting discontent among ordinary people more concerned by the lack of basic services.

"What we saw in Basra on Saturday was a warning," Zebari told AFP. "It was the writing on the wall. The anger they showed was extraordinary."

Zebari said there was a risk that the ambition of politicians, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and former premier Iyad Allawi, was overshadowing the public's demand for nuts-and-bolts services.

"People are tired of a lack of services, lack of action and all this debate on television about government formation and positions. The public sense is one of anger and of tiredness," he said.

Monday's protest in Nasiriyah was the second in the city against power rationing in as many days, although Sunday's demonstration passed off without incident.

Demonstrators said they didn't believe the government's explanation that years of United Nations sanctions against now executed dictator Saddam Hussein's regime followed by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and its violent aftermath meant there was insufficient generator capacity to provide more power.

Dhi Qar province has one of Iraq 's biggest power stations with four units with a nominal total capacity of 840 megawatts. But it is only running at half that for want of fuel, and what electricity it does generate is all transmitted to other provinces through the national grid.

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