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Dr. Iyad Allawi (اياد علاوي) (born
1945) is the interim Prime Minister of Iraq.
A prominent Iraqi-British neurologist
and Iraqi exile political activist, the Shia Muslim became a member of the Iraq Interim Governing Council, which was created following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He became Iraq's first head of government since Saddam Hussein when the council dissolved on June 1, 2004 and named him Prime Minister. A former Ba'athist, Mr Allawi set up and leads the CIA-supported Iraqi National Accord which carried out bombings in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the INA provided fraudulent intelligence about alleged weapons of mass
destruction to MI6.
Allawi has lived about half of his life in the UK and retains British citizenship.
Allawi's Early Life
Allawi was born in 1945 to a prominent Iraqi Shia family; his grandfather helped to negotiate Iraq's independence from
Britain, and his father was an MP.
In the 1960s, he studied at medical school in Baghdad, where he first met Saddam Hussein.
Early Political Career
According to the memoirs of Talib
Shabib, Iyad Allawi began his political life around 1963, as an assassin. Allawi was an active supporter of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party in its early days. In
1971 he moved to London in order to continue his medical education. Some have reported this
as an exile, but some of Allawi's old counterparts have claimed that he continued to serve the Baath Party, and the Iraqi secret
police, searching out enemies of the regime. However, he fell out of favor from the Baath party for undisclosed reasons in
1975[1] .
While Allawi was living in Surrey in 1978, he was awoken in bed one night by an
intruder who proceded to attack the former Baathist assassin with an axe. The intruder left, convinced that Allawi was dead. He
survived the attempted murder, and spent the next year in hospital recovering from his injuries. It is presumed that the attack
was an assassination ordered by Iraq's then deputy president, Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi National Accord
In 1993, Allawi organized the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a group consisting mainly of former military personnel who had defected
from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to instigate a military coup. Allawi was
recruited by the CIA in 1992 as a counterpoint to the more well-known CIA asset Ahmad Chalabi, and because of the INA's links in the Ba'athist establishment.
According to former CIA officers, Allawi's INA organised terrorist attacks in Iraq between 1992 and 1995, probably indlucing the
bombing of a school bus that killed school children. [2] .
Beginning in 2003, Allawi paid prominent Washington lobbyists and New York publicity agents more than $300,000 to give him
access to Washington policy-makers and journalists. The funds passed through his ally in the UK, Mashal Nawab. Operating with the
CIA, the INA unsuccessfully attempted to provoke a military coup in Iraq in 1996.
Allawi channelled the report from an Iraqi officer claiming that Iraq could deploy its supposed weapons of mass destruction within "45 minutes" to
British Intelligence. [3] This claim featured prominently
in the September Dossier which the British government
released in 2002 to gain public support for the Iraq invasion. In the
aftermath of the war, the "45 minute claim" was also at the heart of the confrontation between the British government and the
BBC, and the death of David Kelly later
examined by Lord Hutton. Giving evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, the head of MI6 Richard Dearlove suggested that
the claim related to battlefield weapons rather than weapons of mass destruction.[4] An
Allawi spokesman admitted in January 2004 that the claim was a "crock of shit."[5]
Contemporary Political Career
Allawi was appointed to the Iraqi Governing Council following his return from exile after the fall of Saddam in 2003. He held the rotating presidency of the interim governing council during October of 2003.
On May 28, 2004, he was chosen by the council
to be the Interim Prime Minister of Iraq to govern the
country beginning with the United States' handover of sovereignty (June 30, 2004) until national elections, scheduled for early 2005.
Although many believe the decision was reached largely on the advice of United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar
Brahimi, the New York Times reported that Brahimi only endorsed him
reluctantly after pressure from US officials. In response to a question about the role of the US in Allawi's appointment, Brahimi
replied: “I sometimes say, I'm sure he doesn't mind me saying that, Bremer is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement
in this country.” [6] Two weeks later, Brahimi announced his
resignation, due to "from great difficulties and frustration". [7] In the US, Allawi is often described as a moderate
Shia, a member of Iraq's majority faith, chosen for his moderate religious and political views.
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