Jalal Talabani, former president of Iraq and Kurdish politician, has died in Germany aged 84.
He was Iraq’s president from 2005 to 2014 and a key figure in the Kurdish region of Iraq, where voters last week overwhelmingly backed independence in a controversial referendum.
“Our leader died in Germany,” an official with Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said on Tuesday.
A family member said Talabani’s health had taken a turn for the worse and he been transported to Germany, along with his wife and two children, before the referendum.
Zana Said, an Iraqi Kurdish politician, paid tribute to Talabani as “the only president whose death saddens Arabs, Kurds and all other ethnicities”.
Q&A: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani
Iraq’s head of state plays a largely ceremonial role and is elected by members of parliament.
Talabani was one of the longest-serving figures in contemporary Iraqi Kurdish politics, but for much of the past 40 years, he opposed successive governments in Baghdad.
Among Kurds, he was widely referred to as mam (uncle) Jalal.
Talabani’s death, following a decades-old struggle for Kurdish statehood, came after Iraq’s Kurds voted 92.7 percent to split from Iraq in the September 25 referendum.
The vote, rejected by the Iraqi central government as illegal, has put a deep strain on ties between the Kurds and central Iraqi authorities, who have cut off international flights to the region and threatened further action.
Political career
Talabani was an avuncular politician and a skilled negotiator, who spent years building bridges between the country’s divided factions, despite his efforts for Kurdish independence.
Born in 1933 in the mountain village of Kalkan, he studied law at Baghdad University.
In 1956, while still a student he went into hiding to evade arrest for his political role as founder and secretary-general of the Kurdistan Student Union.
After graduating from law school in 1959, he was called to serve in the Iraqi army where he commanded a tank unit.
Talabani, at right, took to the hills in a first uprising against the Iraqi government in 1961 [Getty Images] |
When the Kurds sought independence and rose against the Iraqi government in 1961, Talabani led battles at home in Iraq, as well as diplomatic missions to Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to drum up support for his people.
Joining the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of Masoud Barzani, current president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Talabani took to the hills in a first uprising against the Iraqi government in 1961.
However, abandoned by their Iranian, US and Israeli allies, Mustafa Barzani’s forces were routed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s army, and the Kurdish revolt collapsed in 1975.
Talabani split from the KDP to form the PUK in an attempt to redefine the Kurdish political movement.
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