Hamad II of Bahrain

Biography

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was born in Riffa in 1950, the son of Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, then crown prince. He was schooled in Bahrain and at The Leys School in Cambridge, trained at Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, graduating in 1968, and later completed the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1973.

Named heir apparent in 1964, he built up Bahrain's armed forces: he commanded the National Guard from 1968, became commander-in-chief of the Bahrain Defence Force when it was formed in 1969, served as minister of state for defence from 1971 to 1988 and founded the air force. During the uprising of the 1990s he was one of the government's negotiators with the Shia-led opposition.

He succeeded his father as emir in March 1999. He released political prisoners, abolished the state security court and put the National Action Charter to a referendum in 2001; in February 2002 a new constitution made Bahrain a kingdom with him as its first king, though critics said it kept real power with the monarch and the appointed upper house.

In 2011 he met the Arab Spring protests with a crackdown, a state of emergency and a request for Saudi and Emirati troops, then set up the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. Abroad he has kept close ties with the United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia, and in 2020 he agreed to normalise relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.