SummaryThe pathogenesis of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection clearly involves immunoregulatory host factors and products of major histocompatibility complex class II genes, which present antigenic peptides to the T‐cell receptor on CD4+ cells, which in turn increase the production of specific antibodies and cytotoxic T lymphocytes. The main objective of this study was to determine the associations of human leucocyte antigen (HLA) DRB1 and DQB1 alleles and their haplotypes in 210 HIV‐1‐infected patients and compare them with 129 healthy normal individuals with same ethnic background. The HLA DRB1 and DQB1 alleles were genotyped using polymerase chain reaction product and sequence‐specific probes for reverse line hybridization, analysed with the Invitrogen Dynal PMP software. Our results revealed a highly significant increase of HLA DRB1*0902 [odds ratio (OR) = 17.12; P = 0.004], DQB1*030103 (OR = 53.53; P = 4.61E‐07) and DQB1*050201 (OR = 16.26; P = 0.0002) alleles while in contrast highly significant decrease in frequency of HLA DQB1*030101 (OR = 0.36; P = 0.0002), DQB1*050301 (OR = 0.22; P < 0.0001) and DQB1*060101 (OR = 0.43; P < 0.0001) among the HIV‐1‐infected patients when compared with the controls. The haplotype DRB1*0902‐DQB1*030103 (OR = 10.65; P = 0.06) was significantly increased in HIV1 patients, while haplotypes DRB1*150101–DQB1*060101 (OR = 0.386, P < 0.0001), DRB1*030101–DQB1*020101 (OR = 0.197, P = 0.004) and DRB1*070101–DQB1*0202 (OR = 0.167, P = 0.001) were significantly decreased. Our results indicate clearly that there are HLA class II alleles involved in the susceptibility to and protection from HIV‐1 infection in our study group and further they vary in different ethnic groups reported in literature.