BAGHDAD: Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s tough-talking but uncharismatic prime minister and former rebel, is set to hold on to the premiership eight months after inconclusive elections.
After a protracted political standoff that kept the country without a government following March 7 elections, rival parties finally reached a power-sharing deal headlined by Maliki hanging on to the top job. Sentenced to death by Saddam Hussein, former guerrilla Maliki, who spent decades in exile, emerged from the shadows in 2006 to take the reins of Iraq’s first permanent post-Saddam government.
In October, Iraq’s main Shiite parliamentary bloc, the National Alliance, chose Maliki as its candidate for the premiership in a move aimed at breaking the deadlock over forming a government that followed the March polls.
The deal was finally sealed late Wednesday night after three days of high-pressure talks, paving the way for a parliament speaker to be elected Thursday. Maliki’s State of Law Alliance came second in the election, two seats behind the Iraqiya bloc of fellow Shiite and former premier Iyad Allawi, but neither had the 163 seats needed for a majority to form a government on its own.
After the election, Maliki joined forces with the Iraqi National Alliance, a coalition of Shiite religious groups, to form the National Alliance (NA).A dour-looking politician who is rarely seen smiling in public, Maliki has forged a reputation as a strong leader who imposed a semblance of stability on war-ravaged Iraq.
Sectarian violence has been the toughest and most brutal challenge to Maliki’s grip on power since he took over the helm of Iraq’s first permanent post-invasion government in May 2006. “I consider myself a friend of the United States, but I’m not America’s man in Iraq,” he declared at the time. Blunt and uncharismatic, he faced down accusations of sectarianism for not tackling Shiite militias in 2007 in defiance of crumbling support at home and abroad.
Former US president George W. Bush has described Maliki as “a good guy, a good man with a difficult job.” Maliki was born in 1950 in the predominantly Shiite central province of Babil.He joined the Shiite Islamic Dawa Party — the oldest Iraqi movement opposed to Saddam — while at university where he gained an MA in Arabic literature.
Maliki fled Iraq in 1979 after Saddam banned the party, and Dawa says he was later sentenced to death in absentia. From 1980 onwards, he lived in Iran and then Syria where he edited Dawa’s newspaper. It was then that he also assumed the nom-de-guerre Jawad and began coordinating cross-border raids from Iran into Iraq.
