Jalal Talabani: ‘The Rare Politician Who Could Talk to Anybody’
Jalal Talabani, who dominated Kurdish politics for decades, ascended to the Iraqi presidency in the post-Saddam Hussein era, and yet remained Mam (“uncle”) Jalal to his people, has died in Berlin. He was 83. No cause was given by Rudaw, the Kurdish news agency, but it said that Talabani had slipped into a coma earlier Tuesday. The former Iraqi […]Krishnadev Calamur writes for The Atlantic:
Jalal Talabani, who dominated Kurdish politics for decades, ascended to the Iraqi presidency in the post-Saddam Hussein era, and yet remained Mam (“uncle”) Jalal to his people, has died in Berlin. He was 83.
No cause was given by Rudaw, the Kurdish news agency, but it said that Talabani had slipped into a coma earlier Tuesday. The former Iraqi president had been ailing since 2012 when he suffered a stroke that effectively removed him from daily Kurdish politics.
Over the years, Talabani embraced, sometimes literally, allies from across the political spectrum. He and his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) made common cause with Saddam in the early 1980s when the Iraqi dictator tried to divide the Kurds during his war with Iran. (The PUK, which was most left wing, saw itself as distinct from Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, which drew its support from the rural parts of Kurdish territory.) He sought refuge in Iran after Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988. He was a close ally of the U.S., and especially the second Bush administration, whose invasion of Iraq in 2003 resulted in Saddam’s ouster and saw Talabani’s unlikely ascent to the presidency.
