Nouri al-Maliki

Nouri al-Maliki (born July 1, 1950, near Al-Ḥillah, Iraq) politician who was prime minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014.

Participation in the Islamic Daʿwah Party

Maliki’s grandfather was a prominent poet and briefly (1926) a government minister. Maliki earned a B.A. (1973) in Islamic studies at Uṣūl al-Dīn College in Baghdad and an M.A. (1992) in Arabic literature at Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn University in Erbil, Iraq. In 1963 he joined the Islamic Daʿwah Party, an underground Shiʿi political party. Despite party splits, Maliki remained faithful to the original faction. In 1979, facing persecution from Saddam Hussein’s regime, he left Iraq for Jordan and then moved to Syria and later Iran, where he arrived in 1982. The Iraqi government condemned him to death in absentia in 1980. In Iran he joined hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiʿis who had fled their homeland or been deported to Iran by Saddam. Maliki spent most of the decade of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in Iran, and in 1989 he relocated to Damascus, where he became head of the Daʿwah Party’s Syrian branch.

After U.S.-led forces toppled the Baʿath regime in April 2003, Maliki returned to Iraq. (See Iraq War.) He became deputy head of the committee responsible for purging former Baʿath Party officials from government jobs and was elected to the Transitional National Assembly in 2005. He served as the senior Shiʿi member of the assembly’s committee that was charged with drafting the new Iraqi permanent constitution. In the general election of December 15, 2005, Maliki was reelected a member of the assembly as part of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shiʿi bloc. The UIA won a plurality of seats and chose a Shiʿi, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, another Daʿwah Party leader, to be the first full-term prime minister. Jaafari’s candidacy, however, was opposed by the Arab Sunnis and the Kurds, who regarded him as a divisive figure. Following a four-month ministerial crisis, the UIA nominated Maliki in April 2006, and he became the new prime minister. He formed a government of national unity with a cabinet that included not only UIA leaders but also members of the Arab Sunni, Kurdish, and secular blocs. Though known throughout his years in exile as Jawād, Maliki decided in April 2006 to resume using his birth name, Nouri.

Prime minister

Maliki’s prime ministership was marred by instability. Violent and intractable warfare between Sunni and Shiʿi militias and a rampant anti-American and antigovernment insurgency together created economic paralysis and a lack of security in the country. An increase in U.S. troop levels in early 2007 had some initial success in stemming the violence, but Maliki failed to achieve any significant political progress. In March 2008 in Baghdad he met with Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country supported Maliki’s government; it was the first visit by an Iranian leader to Iraq in nearly 30 years. Later that month Maliki launched a government operation against the Shiʿi militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra; the fighting ended only after Sadr ordered a cease-fire. Although Maliki called the offensive a success, many believed that his government had been further weakened.

In the country’s March 2010 parliamentary election, Maliki and his State of Law coalition—comprising the Daʿwah Party and other groups of various ethnic and religious backgrounds—were narrowly defeated by the secular coalition of former prime minister Ayad Allawi. Maliki claimed that there had been vote fraud in Baghdad, but a partial recount confirmed Allawi’s victory. Because neither Maliki nor Allawi held the number of seats required to unilaterally form a cabinet, negotiations to form a governing coalition followed. After an extended period of deadlock, the political bloc led by Sadr agreed to endorse Maliki for prime minister in October in exchange for representation in the cabinet. The following month the major political blocs reached a power-sharing agreement that allowed Maliki to continue as prime minister of a national unity government.

But the power-sharing agreement soon proved unworkable. The parties could not agree on ministers for the defense, interior, and national security ministries, leaving Maliki as acting head of those ministries. Maliki’s critics accused him of unlawfully consolidating power and using his influence in the security services and the judiciary to punish his political and sectarian opponents. Following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011, an arrest warrant was issued for Tariq al-Hashimi, the vice president and the highest-ranking Sunni political figure, on charges of having orchestrated sectarian murders. Hashimi denounced the charges as being political in nature and fled the country. He was convicted in absentia, and in September 2012 he was sentenced to death.

Partly because of the perceived heavy-handedness of Maliki toward Sunnis, sectarian polarization began to increase in 2012. Popular protests demanding his ouster were held in Sunni regions of the country, and bombings and civilian deaths reached levels not seen since the height of the Iraq War in 2006–08. The breakdown of intersectarian trust ultimately benefited radical Sunni militants. In 2013 al-Qaeda in Iraq merged with some radical Syrian groups under the name Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), and in January 2014 the group began to take control of the majority-Sunni areas in western Iraq, forcing government troops to withdraw. In June ISIL fighters seized major cities in northern Iraq and continued to expand rapidly until the intervention of international forces in August began to slow their advance.

The crisis was damaging to Maliki, who was seen as being largely responsible for the marginalization of Sunnis. In April 2014 Maliki’s State of Law coalition had won the largest number of seats in parliamentary elections, which appeared to pave the way for Maliki to serve a third term as prime minister, but he soon found himself resisting domestic and international pressure to step aside in favour of a less-divisive figure. In early August Haider al-Abadi, another member of the State of Law coalition, was nominated instead of Maliki to form a new cabinet. Maliki initially denounced Abadi’s nomination as unconstitutional but relented when it became clear that he had lost the support of Iran, the United States, and Shiʿi leaders in Iraq.