Masum, Fuad (1938-…), was president of Iraq from 2014 to 2018. He was Iraq’s second Kurdish president. The Kurds are Iraq’s largest ethnic minority. Masum is a founding member of Iraq’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party. Masum succeeded President Jalal Talabani , who had become Iraq’s first Kurdish president in 2006. Masum is sometimes spelled Massoum, Masoum, or Ma‘ṣūm.
To maintain political balance, Iraq’s three highest offices are divided among the Kurds and the Shī`ite and Sunni Muslim Arab populations. Arabs make up the vast majority of Iraq’s population. Since 2003, the president has been a Kurd, the prime minister has been a Shī`ite, and the parliamentary speaker has been a Sunni.
Mohammed Fuad Masum Hawrami was born in 1938 in Koya, a city in what is now Iraq’s autonomous (self-ruling) Kurdistan region. He studied law at Al-Azhar University in Cairo . He taught at Basra University before earning a doctorate in Islamic philosophy in 1975.
Masum was briefly a member of the Iraqi Communist Party before joining the Kurdistan Democratic Party in 1964. He helped form the PUK in 1975. In 1992, Masum became prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government. After the fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, Masum helped write Iraq’s new constitution.
In 2014, Masum was elected to office amidst a wave of violence caused by a radical Sunni group known as the Islamic State . The group, which had been previously known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), had advanced into northern and central Iraq. Masum named Haider al-Abadi to replace Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister . Over the next four years, the Iraqi government fought the Islamic State with the help of an international coalition and regional armed forces. Iraq declared victory in December 2017. In parliamentary elections held in 2018, Barham Salih replaced Masum as president of Iraq.
