IN IRAQ they say “Lil quta sabat arwaah” — the cat with seven lives. No matter how many times Ahmad Chalabi is knocked down, his enemies just cannot kill him off.

Exiled, disgraced, convicted, branded a collaborator, overlooked in Iyad Allawi’s Government, then rubbished and dropped by his Washington paymasters, the former exile remains widely disliked by many ordinary Iraqis. Yet Mr Chalabi is now poised to gain a top job in the new Shia-led Government, and conceivably the prime ministership.

The victorious Shia coalition was deadlocked last night over its choice of prime minister, with its 140 newly elected parliamentarians split between Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the leader of the Islamic Dawa Party, who remains favourite, and Mr Chalabi, the leader of the smaller Iraqi National Congress. A vote is expected within two or three days. Even if Mr Chalabi fails to win the top job, he is likely to secure a Cabinet post.

That would represent a remarkable comeback. The former Pentagon favouritesupplied much of the faulty intelligence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction upon which the White House based its case for war.

Nine months ago, Mr Chalabi’s disgrace seemed complete. His Baghdad home was raided by Iraqi and US forces amid charges that he had passed US intelligence secrets to Iran.

Even detractors concede that he is a brilliant political operator. “He’s highly intelligent and works hard, restless and consumed by ambition,” Adnan Pachachi, a former colleague on the Iraq’s now defunct Governing Council, said.

Mr Chalabi is the scion of a wealthy Iraqi merchant family who fled Iraq as a child in 1958 when the monarchy was overthrown. After studying mathematics in America, he taught in Beirut before moving to Jordan, where he was involved in a banking collapse that saw him sentenced in absentia to 22 years hard labour for embezzlement.

In London he founded the Iraqi National Congress exile group, and visited Washington to push for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He won the ear of Pentagon hawks, who gave the INC $347,000 (£183,221) a month for intelligence on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

After the invasion, the Pentagon flew Mr Chalabi and 600 INC militia into Iraq. Mr Chalabi was credited with persuading Paul Bremer, Iraq’s US administrator, to pursue his “de-Baathification” policy in May 2003.

But he was later blamed for that disastrous policy, which alienated the Sunni population, and for his assurances that US troops would be welcomed in Iraq, as well as for the WMD intelligence failures. His fall from grace culminated in the CIA-backed raid on his home last May. Undeterred, Mr Chalabi reinvented himself as a devout Shia, critical of the American hand that once fed him, and yoked his party to the Shia List.

Dr Pachachi, a veteran former Iraqi diplomat, was not surprised at Mr Chalabi’s re-emergence and doubted he ever really fell out with the US. “I don’t think anybody takes that very seriously, he was America’s man for so long,” he said. But Dr Pachachi said that Mr Chalabi’s real source of power with the Shia clerics in Najaf lay much closer to home.

“He has very strong support from Iran,” he told The Times. “The Iranians have been pushing for him and they are quite influential in this list. They put a lot of money into it.”

SHARE OF SEATS

Iraq’s Shia alliance has won a narrow majority of seats in the National Assembly, the country’s electoral commission said yesterday. The alliance will need the support of other groupings to secure the two-thirds majority needed to appoint a president, prime minister and two vice-presidents. The United Iraqi Alliance, backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was awarded 140 of the 275 seats. The Kurdish bloc won 75 seats.

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