Everything about Nouri al-Maliki is discreet. He weighs his words and rarely smiles. Perhaps it is his training from his years as a guerrilla fighter. He knows how to cut to the quick.

The 56-year-old, bespectacled politician was an improbable candidate for prime minister. Mr al-Maliki had spent the post-Saddam Hussein era as a backroom enforcer for his Shia fundamentalist Dawa party.

He could be spotted on the sidelines, lobbying politicians from other parties. He was thought of as a hardliner, particularly for his chairing of the parliament’s deBaathification committee. Then, as now, Mr al-Maliki chafed at American control of Iraq’s security and demanded greater powers from the US military.

He seemed destined to stay number two to Ibrahim al-Jaafari, then Prime Minister. But last April, after months of bickering over fellow Dawa party member Mr Jaafari’s lacklustre performance, Mr al-Maliki was drafted in to replace his boss.

Mr al-Maliki was a striking contrast to his cosmopolitan predecessors, both Mr al-Jaafari and Iyad Allawi. Sami al-Askari, his colleague who has known him since 1981, said: “He tells you exactly what he believes. When he says yes, he means it, when he says no, he means it as well.”

Back then, Mr al-Maliki was a young Dawa leader who had fled Iraq during a crackdown on his party by Saddam. Already he was in the leadership of the Dawa party and head of its Damascus office.

Mr al-Maliki was a guerrilla fighter and in the mid-1980s fought against Saddam alongside the Kurds in northern Iraq. He was active in trying to heal splits within the party and belongs to the party faction considered more independent of Iran. His selection as Prime Minister was seen as a slap against Iran’s influence in Iraq.

Initially, many Arab states were reassured by Mr al-Maliki’s pedigree as a nationalist, compared with Mr al-Jaafari whom they had written off as easily intimidated by Iran.

Still, Mr al-Maliki’s formative years were spent as a Shia politicial activist. He had been lured to Dawa’s brand of religious politics in the 1960s while studying Arab literature in Baghdad. Mr al-Maliki was mesmerised by the teachings of Dawa’s chief thinker, the late Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, a relative of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is now perhaps the most powerful figure in Iraq and the backbone of Mr al-Maliki’s support.

But six months into his national unity government, his past has come to haunt him. Mr al-Maliki’s reputation has been sullied by his unwillingness to confront al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, which is blamed for killing thousands of Sunnis. Politicians close to him have explained that unless the Sunni political blocs tackle their own extremists, Mr al-Maliki is unable to confront the militias. Mithal al-Allusi, a Sunni MP, said that he had been overwhelmed. “He is bound by different alliances and factions . . . he is trying to solve our problems, but it is beyond him.”

One day in Iraq 30.11.2006

• Twenty-eight bodies uncovered by Iraqi forces in mass grave south of the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad
• Gunmen kill Nasir Gatami, deputy of a local group caring for Sunni mosques

  Source: Agencies

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