Abadi, Haider al- (1952-…), was prime minister of Iraq from 2014 to 2018. Abadi is a member of the Islamic Dawa Party. Dawa is part of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), an important political group in Iraq. Abadi succeeded Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had been in office since 2006. At the time Abadi took office, Iraq faced a number of challenges, including a bloody uprising led by a radical militant group known as the Islamic State. The Islamic State is sometimes called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Abadi was born in 1952 in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. He joined the Dawa Party as a teenager in 1967. Abadi studied electrical engineering at the University of Baghdad before earning a Ph.D. degree at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. In the late 1970’s, Dawa launched military operations against the Iraqi government headed by dictator Saddam Hussein. The government’s brutal response forced many Dawa members to leave the country. For much of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Abadi lived in exile in the United Kingdom, but his brothers—also Dawa members—remained in Iraq. Two were arrested and executed, and a third spent several years in prison.
The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and Hussein’s government quickly fell from power. Following the U.S. invasion, Abadi returned to Iraq and became minister of communications in the Iraqi governing council. He was elected to the Iraqi Council of Representatives, the national legislature, in 2005, and began his term in 2006. In July 2014, he was elected deputy speaker of the legislature. Several weeks later, Iraqi President Fuad Masum named Abadi prime minister.
A Shī`ite Muslim, Abadi helped improve relations between Iraq’s government and the country’s Sunni Muslims and Kurdish minority. He also helped unite the country in its battle against the Islamic State. By late 2014, the radical militant group had advanced into northern and central Iraq. With the help of airstrikes by an international coalition and Kurdish and other regional armed forces, Iraq fought the Islamic State. In December 2017, Iraq declared victory.
In 2018, many Iraqis criticized Abadi for the slow pace of reconstruction after the four-year battle against the Islamic State. In October, the newly elected president, Barham Salih, named Adel Abdul Mahdi to replace Abadi as prime minister.
