Haider al-Abadi
Haider al-Abadi was prime minister of Iraq from September 2014 to October 2018, the electrical engineer from Manchester whom the Shia parties, Washington, Tehran and the ayatollah Sistani agreed on when Islamic State had taken Mosul, Tikrit and a third of the country in June 2014 and Maliki, whom they blamed, would not go. The four years were the war that took it back, with the American-led coalition's air power, the Kurdish peshmerga, the Iranian-backed popular mobilisation militias raised on Sistani's fatwa and an army rebuilt from the one that had fled, city by city. There was Tikrit in 2015, Ramadi in 2016, Fallujah, and Mosul in July 2017 after nine months of fighting that destroyed the old city. On 9 December 2017 he declared the war over. Three months earlier, when the Kurds held their independence referendum, he had sent the army into Kirkuk and taken the city and its oilfields from them in two days without a battle, which the Kurds had not thought a Baghdad government could do. He was born in Baghdad in 1952, the son of a doctor whom Saddam's regime dismissed, joined the Dawa party at fifteen. He went to Manchester in 1976 for a doctorate in electrical engineering, and he stayed for twenty-seven years when the regime killed two of his brothers and jailed his father, running a firm that designed lifts and holding a patent. He came home in 2003, was minister of communications in the first government. He sat in parliament from 2006 and chaired its finance committee. He was the deputy speaker whom the president named prime minister in August 2014 over Maliki's objection, with Maliki's own party's votes. The oil price's fall to thirty dollars in 2016 with a war to pay for was the other half of the term. The protests in Basra over water and electricity in the summer of 2018, in which the Iranian consulate was burned, were what beat him. His list came third in the election of May 2018, behind Sadr's and the militias', and Adel Abdul-Mahdi took over in October. He has led the Victory Coalition in parliament since, a smaller voice in a Shia camp that Iran and Sadr divide between them.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: prime minister, engineer, politician
