Adil Abd al-Mahdi

Adil Abd al-Mahdi (2008)

Adil Abd al-Mahdi al-Muntafiki , also Adil Abdelmahdi ( Arabic عادل عبد المهدي المنتفكي, DMG ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mahdī al-Muntafikī ; * 1942 in Baghdad ) is an Iraqi politician . The Shiite was Vice President of Iraq from 2005 to 2011 and thus a member of the Iraqi Presidential Council , which also included the Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Haschimi and the Kurdish President Jalal Talabani . He became Prime Minister of the country on October 25, 2018. After popular protests, he resigned at the end of November 2019, but remained in office until Mustafa Al-Kadhimi took office.

Life

Al-Mahdi’s father, Abdul Mahdi Shobar, led guerrilla units against the British occupation after the First World War and was later Minister of Education under King Faisal . Al Mahdi attended a Jesuit school in Baghdad. He was a member of the Ba'ath Party at a young age , fell out with it, was tortured and sentenced to death. In 1969 he fled to France, joined the Maoist communists , studied and earned a doctorate in economics . He belonged to a split from the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP).

After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he turned to political Islam and was one of the founding members of the pro-Iranian, religiously influenced exile party SCIRI , which played a key role in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein . He returned to France regularly. His pro-Iranian activities did not detract from his influence; He acted as a mediator in the negotiations in the Eurodif litigation regarding the non-delivery of 10% of the uranium produced from the uranium enrichment plant at Pierrelatte to Iran. The Iranian government had a contractual right to it, as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had invested a billion dollars in 1974 (and another 180 million dollars in 1977) in the construction of the facility. In August 2007, the US magazine Newsweek named Al-Mahdi as France's man in Iraq .

From the SCIRI today's influential party went Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq ago, which is also part of the in the parliamentary election on January 30, 2005 victorious coalition United Iraqi Alliance is. From 2004 he was finance minister , later vice president for six years and finally oil minister from 2014 to 2016.

In 2017 he left the SCIRI party and started as an independent. Today he sees himself as a secular politician and is considered a man of balance and a technocrat .

When President Barham Salih took office in 2018, he surprisingly appointed Al-Mahdi as Prime Minister. Al-Mahdi visited Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in April 2019 and announced a $ 14 billion plan to modernize Iraq's electricity infrastructure in cooperation with Siemens . At the end of September 2019, Al-Mahdi agreed with China that Iraq would participate in the New Silk Road .

At the beginning of October 2019, there were mass protests that lasted for weeks against the great influence of Iran on the political leadership in Iraq, which was also accused of corruption and mismanagement . As a result, Al-Mahdi announced his resignation on November 29, 2019, thereby fulfilling a central demand of the demonstrators. After Parliament accepted his resignation, he remained in office until May 7, 2020, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi was sworn in as his successor.