Jalal Talabani

November 12, 1933 – October 3, 2017

Iraqi Kurdish leader who founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and was President of Iraq from 2005 to 2014.

Biography

Jalal Talabani was born in 1933 in the village of Kelkan in Iraqi Kurdistan, into a family of the Talabani branch of the Zangana tribe that had produced several prominent figures. He became active in Kurdish politics as a young man and studied law in Baghdad.

He was a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which expelled him in 1964 and readmitted him in 1970. In 1975 he and a group of Kurdish intellectuals and activists founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which he led as secretary-general for the rest of his life. He was among the Kurdish leaders of the uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq he sat on the Iraqi Governing Council and served a term as its rotating president. On 6 April 2005 the Iraqi National Assembly elected him president of Iraq, and he was sworn in the next day. He served until July 2014.

In December 2012 Talabani suffered a stroke and spent some 18 months in treatment abroad before returning to Iraq in July 2014. He died in Berlin on 3 October 2017 from complications of that stroke.