Nouri al-Maliki
Nouri al-Maliki was prime minister of Iraq for eight years, from 2006 to 2014, chosen as a compromise nobody thought strong, who beat the Shia militias in Basra in 2008 and the Sunni insurgency with American help, saw the Americans out in 2011, and then governed as a Shia sectarian, arresting the Sunni vice-president on the day the last convoy left, firing on Sunni protest camps, purging the army's officers for loyalty and hollowing it out with corruption, so that when the Islamic State came to Mosul in June 2014 four divisions ran and the caliphate was declared on territory his politics had lost; he was forced out that August and has been a power behind the government since. He was born near Hilla in 1950, joined the Dawa party, the Shia Islamist party Saddam persecuted, as a student, fled in 1979 with a death sentence behind him, and spent twenty-four years in Iran and Syria running Dawa's underground and its guerrilla operations. He came back in 2003, sat on the committee that purged Baathists, and was picked as prime minister in April 2006 when the Americans vetoed the incumbent and the Shia parties wanted someone weak. Iraq was then in civil war. He supported the American surge, sent the army against Muqtada al-Sadr's militia in Basra in March 2008 in an operation the Americans had to rescue, and emerged from it as the strong man the Shia had wanted, with the Sunni Awakening councils that had beaten al-Qaeda in Iraq now his to pay or abandon. He abandoned them. He came second in the 2010 election and kept the office through eight months of bargaining and an Iranian-brokered deal, took the interior and defence ministries for himself, and after the Americans left in December 2011 issued a warrant for the Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi, who fled. The Sunni protest camps of 2013 were cleared by force at Hawija with fifty dead, and Fallujah went over to the Islamic State in January 2014. The fall of Mosul on 10 June, to a few thousand fighters against thirty thousand soldiers on paper, ended him; Sistani, Iran and Washington all withdrew their support and he gave way to Haider al-Abadi on 14 August, taking a vice-presidency. He remains the leader of the State of Law bloc and of Dawa and a maker of governments.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: prime minister, politician
