Former Iraqi president and Kurdish leader Talabani dies

IRBIL, IRAQ » Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish guerrilla leader who became Iraq’s president after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, and who embodied hopes for a unified, peaceful future through years of strife, has died at the age of 83, Kurdish officials said Tuesday.

Talabani was often seen as a unifying elder statesman who could soothe tempers among Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But the country’s centrifugal forces have only accelerated since he was hospitalized nearly five years ago, as it has battled the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group and faced growing demands for Kurdish independence.

Talabani suffered a stroke in 2012 and was moved to a German hospital later that year for treatment. He died Tuesday after his condition rapidly deteriorated, according to Marwan Talabani, a relative and senior official in the office of Talabani’s son.

His death came days after the Kurds voted for independence, essentially rejecting the vision of a unified, multiethnic Iraq that he had championed in the chaotic years after the U.S.led invasion.

The vote, which was led by his longtime Kurdish rival, regional President Masoud Barzani, is not expected to lead to Kurdish state anytime soon and has further isolated the small land-locked region. Iraq and its neighbors have rejected the vote, and Baghdad has banned international flights and threatened to take control of the autonomous Kurdish region’s borders.

Talabani came from a generation of Kurdish leaders who spent decades fighting for selfrule and whose people were often brutally repressed by the central government.

Born in a tiny village north of the city of Irbil on Nov. 12, 1933, Talabani was in his early teens when he first joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party, at the time the main Kurdish political force trying to carve out an autonomous homeland for Iraq’s Kurds.

In the 1960s, he joined the Kurdish uprising against the Iraqi government. When the revolt collapsed in 1975, Talabani broke off from the Barzani-headed KDP to form the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. To this day Kurdish politics in Iraq remain dominated by two families: The Barzanis in Irbil and the Talabanis in Sulaimaniyah.

A year later Talabani again took up arms against the central government and eventually joined forces with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. In the late 1980s, Saddam launched the Anfal Campaign, in which more than 50,000 Kurds were killed, many by poison gas attacks.

Iraq’s Kurds took their first steps toward autonomy in the early 1990s under the protection of a U.S.-enforced no-fly-zone aimed at halting Saddam’s killings. But the Kurds quickly fell into infighting. Pitched battles between forces loyal to Barzani and those who sided with Talabani killed thousands and only subsided when Barzani called on Saddam’s army to help him push back Talabani’s men.