ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s parliament elected Fouad Massoum, a 76-year-old Kurdish politician, as the country’s new president.
He succeeds Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s outgoing president who returned to Kurdistan Saturday after a year-and-a-half in Germany recuperating from a stroke.
Massoum is a founding member of Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and is his longtime confidante.
His election, coming a week after MPs in Baghdad finally elected Salim al-Jabouri as the Sunni parliament speaker, now places the spotlight squarely on Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister.
Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds have absolutely rejected a third term for Maliki, who has remained adamant he will stay, even as a third of the country has fallen to jihadi-led militants and the Kurds have announced they might seek independence.
Out of the 225 MPs present in the 325-seat Council of Representatives, 175 voted in Massoum’s favor.
Under a power-sharing agreement in place since after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president is a Kurd, the prime minister a Shiite and the parliament speaker a Kurd.
Massoum – whose full name is Muhammad Fouad Massoum Hawrami -- was born in 1938 in the township of Koye in Iraqi Kurdistan.
He and Talabani come from prominent religious families and spent their childhood in the same town and remain close friends to this day.
As a teenager Massoum studied at Kurdish religious schools, and in 1958 he began studies at Egypt’s prestigious Al-Azhar University, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Islamic studies and later his PhD.
Massoum was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party, which he left early in his career to join the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in 1964.
He taught at the University of Basra and was in charge of the KDP's military operations in Iraqi Kurdistan in the late 1960s.
Massoum was a representative of the KDP and Mustafa Barzani in Cairo between 1973-75.
He is one of the founders of the PUK and has remained one of its leading members.
Because of his old ties with the KDP he helped the reconciliation process with the PUK in the 1980s, when the two were at war. In 1992, he became the first prime minister of Kurdistan.
Massoum was a member of the negotiating team in Baghdad that drafted the Iraqi constitution following the 2003 US-led invasion.
In 2004, he became the first speaker of the interim Iraqi parliament, and the year after he became an Iraqi MP.
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