IRAQ’S victorious Shia coalition was lining up behind its front-runner for prime minister yesterday: a Shia Islamic physician who spent years in Iran and Britain after fleeing Saddam Hussein’s purges.
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of the Islamic Dawa Party, has emerged as the likeliest candidate to lead the 140-strong majority group in parliament after officials said that his chief rivals had dropped out.
Humam Hamoudi, a spokesman for the United Iraqi Alliance, said that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq had agreed to withdraw Adel Abdul Mahdi, the French-educated Finance Minister. This leaves Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favourite, as a compromise candidate.
“We have two candidates for the alliance, Ahmad Chalabi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, but al-Jaafari is the most likely to be the alliance candidate,” Mr Hamoudi said.
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Adnan Ali, Dr al-Jaafari’s Dawa deputy, added that the decision would be officially certified over the next week but the criteria for selection had been “popularity with the Iraqi people at grassroots levels, experience, transparency and international acceptability”.
Dr al-Jaafari, 58, is the serving Vice-President in Iraq and is widely respected, even among moderate Sunnis.
Promising that the Shias would involve under-represented Sunnis in the government, parliament and committees drafting the constitution, he distinguished between Sunnis who kill other Iraqis and those who chose to boycott the election. “We have to open the door and we have to involve a good number of them at very senior levels,” he told The Times just before the election results were announced.
“They have to share in the government. We cannot imagine any government without sharing with our Kurdish and Sunni brothers, and even non-Muslims.” Born in the holy city of Karbala, Dr al-Jaafari joined Dawa — the oldest Islamic party in Iraq — in 1966 and studied medicine at Mosul University, graduating in 1974.
Married with two sons and three daughters, he was one of the main Dawa activists in northern Iraq but fled the country in 1980 when Saddam’s henchmen began a crackdown on internal opposition, murdering the party’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr and thousands of others.
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Dawa (the Call) split between those who remained in Iraq and exiles, with bitterness still between the two factions.
It is the exiles with money, political experience and contacts with foreign governments who now dominate the scene. Twenty-three years after his flight, Dr al-Jaafari returned to Iraq after the US invasion. A pragmatist, he agreed to serve on the now-defunct — and widely despised — Governing Council, while calling for US troops to leave within the year.
He has an office in a moated former Saddam residence, guarded by US Navy bodyguards. Unlike his coalition’s ascetic spiritual figurehead, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Dr al-Jaafari operates like any technocrat, his office a fusion of Koranic texts, chandeliers and flat computer screens.
On his bookshelves Francis Fukuyama and Nelson Mandela sit alongside volumes of Sunni and Shia doctrine.
Privately, Shia officials confirm that they want to expedite the departure of 150,000-plus US-led troops from Iraq but Dr al-Jaafari told The Times that he has indicated that asking coalition troops to depart “might not be the proper decision”.
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He said: “I think this issue is not related to an absolute time. I think it’s directly related to the situation on the ground.
“Even when the multinational forces are still here, large numbers of Iraqis are still facing danger, so pulling out these troops will expose the country to a greater danger without having Iraqi security forces ready to take over.”
Despite accusations that the Islamist parties use violence — executing alcohol-sellers and beating CD shop owners — to impose their interpretations of Islamic law, Dr al-Jaafari insists that his party advocates pluralism and the rule of law.
Dr al-Jaafari also dismisses fears of rule-by-clergy, as in neighbouring Iran, where he also lived in exile, insisting that the parliament would be run by politicians, not by Ayatollah al-Sistani. He urges only recognition of Islam as the official religion and as “one source” of the constitution, deftly citing western parallels for Catholicism in Ireland and Bavaria.
IBRAHIM AL-JAAFARI