With deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein held by U.S. forces in a Baghdad prison, his longtime nemesis, Jalal Talabani, stepped to the top of Iraq's political establishment on April 6, 2005 and accepted his appointment to become the country's new president.
 For
Talabani, the appointment capped a life of politics that began some
60 years earlier and involved frequent stints fighting Hussein's regime
as a leader of the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.
For the country's 5 million
Kurds, long persecuted during Hussein's reign, it was cause for celebration.
While the position is mostly symbolic and much less substantive than
the role of prime minister, this was the first time in history Iraq
had a Kurdish president.
Born in 1933 to a wealthy
landowning family in Koy Sanjak in the Irbil Province, Talabani -- affectionately
referred to by many Kurds as "Uncle" Jalal -- wasted no time before
entering politics.
At 13, according to his political
party's Web site, he founded a student association of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party and quickly rose through the ranks of the KDP leadership.
In 1961, not long after graduating
with a law degree from Baghdad University, Talabani joined in a successful
revolt against the government of Abdal-Karim Qasim and two years later
he led a Kurdish delegation in talks with the government of new Iraqi
president Abd-al-Salam Arif.
By the mid-1960s Talabani's
relationship with KDP leader Mustafa Barzani turned rocky, leading Talabani
to split from the party.
Eventually, in 1975, Talabani
formed his own party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, adding to what
would become an often bitter and bloody rivalry between him and Barzani.
But while Talabani and Barzani
fought for control of the country's Kurdish population, Saddam Hussein's
regime posed a much bigger threat to Talabani and much of his energy
during the 1980s centered on avoiding a campaign of ethnic cleansing
that Hussein led against those with ties to Talabani.
The campaign, which reached
its peak in the late 1980s and involved the use of firing squads, mass
deportation and chemical weapons, led to the displacement of tens of
thousands of Kurds and the deaths of as many as 182,000 people, according
to Human Rights Watch.
For years, the West steered
clear of getting involved in the violence. But the political situation
changed in 1991 with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf
War, which drove Hussein out of the oil-rich country along Iraq's southeastern
border.
When the war ended, the United
States and Britain looked to Talabani and the country's Kurdish population
as a way of containing Hussein, and protection from Hussein's regime
was secured through the establishment of a U.S.-British no-fly zone.
With the threat of Hussein
held at bay through the no-fly zone, Talabani and Barzani soon resumed
their political rivalry for the now-autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan
in the mid-1990s, this time leading the Kurds into civil war.
After four years of war and
continued efforts by Britain and the United States to end the in-fighting,
Talabani's PUK reach an accord with Barzani's KDP in 1998.
Talabani emerged as a candidate
for the country's top leadership positions following Hussein's removal
in 2003. Talabani had ingratiated himself with the Bush administration
by throwing PUK troops behind the Allied effort, and with the Kurds
winning 27 percent of the 275 parliamentary seats in the January 2005
election, finishing second, a Kurd in a central leadership position
became an important concession for the country's Shiite-majority.
Talabani and Barzani agreed
that should Talabani remain president when elections take place possibly
as early as December 2005, Barzani would lead Iraq's Kurdistan region.
-- Compiled by Josh Drobnyk for the Online NewsHour
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