Iraqi PM fails to live up to high hopes

When Shi'ite militias loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fought to take control of Iraq in 2008, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki surprised the United States and other Western governments by ordering his armed forces to put them down.

After all, Mr Maliki had joined the revolutionary Shi'ite Islamist Dawa Party as a university student back in the 1970s, when it was waging its own insurgency against Iraq's government, and the country's Shi'ite majority felt empowered by his rise.

Since sweeping aside Mr Sadr's uprising six years ago, however, Mr Maliki appears to have been more true to his roots, rankling Iraq's Sunni minority.

He was accused of abandoning any notion of building consensus between the Shi'ites and Sunnis in favour of concentrating power among his mostly Shi'ite allies after the 2010 election, according to the BBC. He has also become more closely allied with Iran, where Shi'ites also dominate, over issues such as the conflict in Syria, with its Sunni majority.

By most accounts, Mr Maliki's perceived shift has fuelled the insurgency by a radical Sunni arm, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), that now threatens to tear modern Iraq apart.

That would come as nothing new for the Prime Minister, who turned 64 last Friday. His own life has hardly been a model of stability. Born in 1950 in Hilla, Iraq, his parents were middle-class.

But his grandfather Hasan Abdul Muhassin was a religious cleric, poet and politician who joined the revolt against British rule in 1920. According to the BBC, Mr Maliki's grandfather was responsible for his own strong nationalist ideals.

As the boy grew up, Iraq went from a monarchy overthrown by a coup in 1958, whose military leader was overthrown by another coup in 1963, to one taken over by the Ba'ath Party in 1968 and the rise of General Saddam Hussein.

In those turbulent times, Mr Maliki opted to study arts. While he went to a religious college founded by a leader of the underground Al Dawa Islamic party for his bachelor's degree, he earned a master's in Arabic literature from the University of Baghdad.

In 1979, the Dawa party challenged Saddam's leadership. The military dictator's response was bloody. Tens of thousands of party members and sympathisers died in an ensuing purge.

Mr Maliki, however, was one of the few who managed to escape. He spent the next 25 years in exile, moving between Iran, Syria and Lebanon, where he became a follower of Lebanese Shi'ite leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Hizbollah's original spiritual adviser. Along the way, Mr Maliki became Dawa's leader and headed a resistance movement against Saddam. In 1991, he flirted with the anti-Saddam, US-sponsored Iraq National Congress. Then by the end of the Gulf War, he was able to return to the Kurdish part of Iraq protected by the Anglo-American no-fly zone.

Following Saddam's downfall in 2003, Mr Maliki - who is married with three daughters and a son - returned to Baghdad but, given his anonymity on the world stage, did not appear destined for higher office.

Then US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad encouraged him to run for prime minister, the New York Times said, in part because he was viewed as a man who could not be corrupted. He did so, and became Prime Minister in 2006.

After helping to draft Iraq's new Constitution, he authorised the US troop surge in 2007 that targeted Mr Sadr's Shi'ite militias the next year. It also took aim at Al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni militants. At the time, he felt confident, as was obvious in a 2008 interview with Germany's Der Spiegel.

"I lead a very simple life - one that is shaped by external forces, which is apparently what fate has determined for us Iraqis," he told the magazine. "...What keeps me going? The constant exertion of my job - and the successes we are now having. It means a lot to me to see how much closer we are today to a democratic Iraq, one that respects human rights, than we were only a few months ago."

However, even then, not all observers were convinced.

During her unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Democratic Party's US presidential nomination, Mrs Hillary Clinton noted Mr Maliki's government was "too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders", and said she hoped its Parliament would replace him with a "less divisive and more unifying figure".

With the shocking collapse of his army before a Sunni militant assault and the potential threat that it poses to his Shi'ite-led government, Mr Maliki now spends most of his time running the war.

The New York Times reports that he meets military commanders, travels to the front lines, makes speeches at recruitment drives rallying young Shi'ite men and, according to members of his inner circle, often falls into fits of anger.

What he does not do, they say, is spend much time on the political reconciliation with the Sunni Arabs and Kurds that his international allies in Washington and Teheran have insisted is his country's only possible salvation.

The newspaper reported his top aide in charge of reconciliation as saying recently that he thinks it is all but hopeless. "Now there is a war, there is not reconciliation," said Mr Amir al-Khuzai. "With whom do we reconcile?"

This article was first published on June 23, 2014.
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