Talabani, Jalal, << tah lah BAH nee, juh LAHL >> (1933-2017), was president of Iraq from 2006 to 2014. He had earlier served as interim (temporary) president for one year. He was the first Kurdish leader of an Arab country. The Kurds are an ethnic group whose homeland covers parts of Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Talabani was the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a political party he helped found in 1975.
Talabani had been part of the Iraqi government since 2003. That year, United States-led international forces overthrew the government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Talabani joined the Iraqi Governing Council, which was created by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to administer Iraq after Hussein’s downfall. The council drafted an interim constitution. Its presidency rotated monthly, and Talabani served as president in November 2003.
In January 2005, Iraqi voters elected an interim National Assembly. An alliance of Kurdish parties, which included the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), won the second largest number of seats. In April 2005, the Assembly elected Talabani as interim president. The Assembly oversaw the preparation of a permanent constitution, which the Iraqi people approved in a referendum in October 2005. In December, Iraqi voters elected a permanent legislature. In April 2006, the legislature, known as the Council of Representatives, elected Talabani to a four-year term as president. He began a second term in 2010.
Talabani was born in 1933 in the village of Kelkan, near the Dokan Reservoir in northern Iraq. He joined the KDP when he was 14 years old. In 1959, he graduated from the University of Baghdad with a law degree. Talabani then performed his required national service in the Iraqi army. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, he helped lead the Kurdish fight for autonomy (self-government) in Iraq. After the Kurdish resistance was largely defeated in 1975, Talabani helped found the PUK and served as its leader. The PUK and KDP spent the next two decades in a rivalry that sometimes led to violence and war. In 1998, the two parties signed a peace treaty. In 2006, they began to jointly govern the autonomous (self-governing) Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Talabani died on Oct. 3, 2017.
