Phoenix Update Friday, June 11th, 2010 ... and the winner is ...?
June 30, 2010
Sadrists morally committed to nominate Jaafari as PM – source
BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: The Sadr Movement is still committed to the nomination of Ibrahim al-Jaafari to hold the position of Iraq’s Prime Minister (PM).
“This is a moral commitment,” Mohammed al-Bahadli, the head of the movement’s political bureau, told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
He noted that the movement does not force other political blocs to accept this nomination.
Last April, Jaafari came first in a public referendum carried out by the Sadr Movement to find the figure that enjoys popular acceptance for this nomination.
MH (P)/SR
Jaafari Fact Sheet:
Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a physician by training, joined the Islamic Dawa Party, a clandestine Shi’a Islamist movement, while studying medicine at Mosul University in 1966. Following the crackdown on members of Dawa in 1980, al-Jaafari fled to Iran, where he stayed for almost a decade and continued his activities on behalf of Dawa. Al-Jaafari moved to London in 1989, where he worked as spokesman for the Dawa Party. He returned to Iraq shortly after the 2003 invasion.2
Al-Jaafari served as Prime Minister of Iraq’s transitional government from April 2005 to May 2006. He presided over the marked rise of sectarian violence and the insurgency in Iraq and his term in office was one of the bloodiest periods in Iraq since 2003. Al-Jaafari was seen as incapable of stemming the rise in sectarian and insurgent violence; many viewed his government as complicit in the sectarian cleansing.
Following Iraq’s first national election in January 2005, al-Jaafari was selected to continue as Prime Minister by the United Iraqi Alliance, but Sunni and Kurdish blocs objected strongly to his candidacy on grounds of his inability to reverse the worsening security situation.4 Al-Jaafari was ultimately forced to step down from the post in favor of another Prime Ministerial candidate, Nouri al-Maliki, after months of increased pressure and tense negotiations.
Al-Jaafari’s tolerance of Shi’a militias, his relationship with Iran, and his close connections to Muqtada al-Sadr made his continuation as Prime Minister unacceptable to U.S. and even Iraqi officials during the government formation negotiations in 2006.
Al-Jaafari broke from Dawa in late May 2008 to form his own party, the National Reform Trend, amidst growing conflict with Dawa’s leadership.7 The move was widely seen as an effort to improve his political prospects in advance of provincial elections (then scheduled for late 2008). He was formally expelled from Dawa in early June 2008.
Al-Jaafari has maintained a close relationship with the Sadrist Trend and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).
Muqtada al-Sadr was al-Jaafari’s main backer during the government formation negotiations in 2006, even after he lost the support of the other main Shi’a parties.
Al-Jaafari defended Sadr’s militia, the Jaysh al-Mahdi, in 2006, despite its involvement in sectarian violence.
Sadrist support for al-Jaafari continues. He garnered the most votes in the Sadrist referendum for Prime Minister, an unofficial poll administered by the Sadrist Trend.
Al-Jaafari’s relationship with members of ISCI dates to his time in exile in Iran during the 1980s.12 He was one of only a small number of Iraqi politicians to attend the funeral procession for Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim in Tehran.
More recently, Jaafari was integral in the negotiations to rebuild the Shi’a electoral alliance in advance of the 2010 elections, along with members of ISCI.
Al-Jaafari ran in the March 2010 parliamentary election as part of the Iraqi National Alliance, the predominantly Shi’a bloc that included the Sadrists and ISCI; however, his party only won one seat in the election, his own.
http://www.understandingwar.org/reference/fact-sheet-ibrahim-al-jaafari
