Iraq
Ayad Allawi
Ayad Allawi
 Viewer |
| Muqtada al-Sadr |
| Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim |
|
|
| Ayad Allawi (1946-
Allawi was born in Baghdad into a wealthy Shiite family of prominent business leaders. As a young man, Allawi joined the Baath Party after it gained control of Iraq and organized party meetings at his medical school. He left Baghdad for advanced medical studies in London in 1971, eventually becoming a neurologist. Alawi occasionally treated young Saddam Hussein for minor ailments. Allawi, before his 1976 resignation from the Baath Party, was in charge of all Baath Party organizations in Europe. Following his resignation, Hussein tried to lure him back with threats and bribes. When he refused and subsequently struck up a relationship with the British intelligence service (MI6), he was placed on a liquidation list by Hussein. Iraqi secret police were sent to assassinate Allawi in London in 1978, bursting into his bedroom and hacking him with an ax. He suffered serious injuries and spent nearly a year in a hospital. He continues to walk with a limp because of injuries to his leg suffered in the attack. The attack on his life helped persuade Allawi in 1979 to begin organizing former Baathists in exile, like himself. And after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, suddenly Mr. Alawi and his organization were in great demand. Financial support flowed in from Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and, eventually, the CIA. That year he founded the Iraqi National Accord. After shuttling between Kurdish areas, Syria and Jordan, Allawi, who has good ties with Washington, settled in London. INA is made up mostly of defectors from the military and intelligence services. In 1996, he worked with the CIA to plot a coup that was to involve Iraqi army generals toppling Hussein. But the Iraqi leader penetrated the plot and arrested and executed many of its operatives. Allawi returned to Baghdad shortly after Hussein's government fell in April 2003, running his party from an abandoned Baath Party office. On May 28, 2004 he was unanimously nominated to be Iraq's interim prime minister by Iraq's U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. |