Word: jaafari
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...winner on election day was the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a mostly Shiite list assembled under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and led by moderate Islamist parties with historic ties to Iran. The UIA, which has nominated Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, won 140 of the 275 seats in the Assembly, giving it the simple majority required to pass legislation, but not the two-thirds required under the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution bequeathed by former U.S. administrator J. Paul Bremer, to choose a government. That means the Shiites have to negotiate a deal...
...strong second in Iraq's national elections, winning 75 of the new Assembly's 275 seats. That gave the Kurds, who make up 17% of Iraq's population, enough clout to demand top jobs in the new government. While the victorious Shi'ites last week tapped Ibrahim al-Jaafari for Iraq's most powerful position of Prime Minister, Talabani, 72, has emerged as the most likely successor to Saddam as Iraq's President. And though the post is intended to be largely symbolic, Talabani plans to use the position of titular head of state to protect Kurdish interests. "I must...
That said, al-Jaafari is a man with a past. He leads the Islamic Dawa Party, a deeply religious Shi'ite group that spearheaded a rebellion against Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1970s. Dawa received backing from the Shi'ite regime in Iran. During the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Saddam made membership in the party punishable by death and brutally suppressed the movement. Like much of the Dawa leadership, al-Jaafari fled to Iran and then to Britain. The group's past activities are murky. Al-Jaafari was a member of Dawa's political wing when...
Since returning to Iraq after the U.S. invasion, al-Jaafari has worked to shore up his secularist credentials. "He may head a Shi'ite party, but he has never sounded like a Shi'ite politician," says Ammar Zain Alabideen, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the leading Sunni political group. Dawa retains ties to the Iranian government, but al-Jaafari says that won't jaundice the way he views Washington. "The U.S. liberated Iraq from Saddam, and for that we will forever be grateful," he told TIME...
...biggest challenge facing al-Jaafari and the newly elected 275-member National Assembly will be proving they can run Iraq on their own. Al-Jaafari says he hopes to form a national-unity government, with a rainbow cabinet of all major parties, including Sunnis, most of whom boycotted the Jan. 30 election. "This is not a time to be excluding anybody," he says. Indeed, al-Jaafari will need all the help he can get. --By Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad. With reporting by Timothy J. Burger/Washington