Nouri al-Maliki

Biography

Nouri al-Maliki was born in 1950 near Hindiya in central Iraq; his grandfather had been a cleric and minister under King Faisal I. He studied at the Usul al-Din College in Baghdad and took a master's degree at Salahaddin University, and worked for a time in the education department in Hillah. A member of the banned Islamic Dawa Party, he fled Iraq in 1979 to escape a death sentence and spent 24 years in exile in Syria and Iran, editing the party newspaper and leading its Damascus branch.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 he returned to become deputy head of the de-Baathification commission, was elected to the transitional National Assembly in 2005 and helped draft the new constitution. In May 2006 he became prime minister at the head of a cabinet approved by parliament, and in 2007 he succeeded Ibrahim al-Jaafari as secretary-general of the Dawa Party. He signed Saddam Hussein's death warrant in December 2006.

He secured a second term after the 2010 election, also taking charge of the interior, defence and national security ministries. His government was accused of corruption, of favouring Shia militias and of fuelling sectarian division, and after the Islamic State overran northern Iraq in 2014 he gave way to Haider al-Abadi. He then served as one of Iraq's vice presidents in 2014-2015 and 2016-2018. In January 2026 the Coordination Framework nominated him again for prime minister, but it reportedly withdrew the nomination that March.