Seeker Blog

April 7, 2005: CFR posts a useful backgrounder on Iraq’s new prime minister:

What kind of prime minister will Ibrahim Jaafari make? Jaafari, 58, is a conservative, religious Shiite. For nearly 40 years, he has been active in the Islamic Dawa Party, a movement committed to establishing an Islamic state in Iraq. Experts say he would like to ensure that the constitution the transitional government will draft respects sharia, or Islamic law, but they disagree on how aggressively the soft-spoken family physician will pursue this aim. “He is an Islamist.… He will pursue his ideas. But he is also very ambitious and will be ready to compromise,” says Faleh A. Jabar, a research fellow at Birkbeck College of the University of London and author of The Shiite Movement in Iraq.

What is Jaafari’s background? Jaafari was born in 1947 in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala into a large family that traces its lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. In 1966, while attending medical school in Mosul, he joined the Dawa Islamiya (Islamic Call) Party, which was founded in 1957 to promote political Islam during a time when communism and other secular political movements were gaining strength. In 1980, Jaafari fled to Iran to escape Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown on the party. In 1989, he moved to London, where he became Dawa’s spokesman. In 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Jaafari returned to his homeland. He became the first of nine rotating presidents of the now-defunct Iraqi Governing Council, and in June 2004 was appointed as one of two vice presidents of the interim government. In a 2004 opinion poll, he was ranked the third most popular figure in Iraq, after the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, and Muqtada al-Sadr, the young, renegade Shiite cleric whose militia fought against U.S. forces in April, June, and August 2004.

What accounts for Jaafari’s popularity? The Dawa Party is an indigenous Iraqi movement that for decades was the main resistance party inside Iraq against Saddam Hussein. Thousands of its members were jailed or killed because of their opposition to the regime. “Dawa has earned immense public respect for this and represents a powerful combination of nationalism and Islamism,” says Graham E. Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Jaafari draws his support from Iraqi Shiites—some 60 percent of the population—because his party is made up of Shiites and is rooted in their religious tradition. (Experts say, however, that in its first decade of existence, Dawa was a pan-Islamic movement that embraced both Sunni and Shiite precepts.) “Jaafari is seen as an Iraqi who struggled underground and suffered indignities. He was consistently one thing [a Dawa supporter]—unlike other candidates, who changed their allegiances over time,” says Phebe Marr, senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and author of The Modern History of Iraq.

These are the other questions covered in the full CFR article:

Has the Dawa Party used violence to support its goals?

How did the party react?

Is Dawa still a terror group?

Was Jaafari involved in terrorist activities?

What was the relationship between Jaafari and Iran?

Does Jaafari support the idea that, as in Iran, clerics should run the government?

How much of a religious bent would a Jaafari government have?

What are Jaafari’s views about Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic groups?

What has Jaafari said about Iran?

Would Jaafari ask U.S. forces to leave Iraq soon?

How would a Jaafari-led government treat former members of Saddam’s regime?

Would he be a strong leader?