Current Affairs Mustafa Al Kadhimi appointed as Iraq’s new Prime Minister

Mustafa Al Kadhimi appointed as Iraq’s new Prime Minister

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Mustafa al-Kadhimi has been appointed as the new Iraqi Prime Minister after the Iraqi parliament approved Kadhimi’s government at an emergency session.
The parliament approved of 15 cabinet ministers and rejected the remaining five.

BRIEF BACKGROUND

He has become Iraq’s first proper Prime Minister after Adel Abdul Mahdi resigned in November 2019 due to massive anti-government protests.
Two previous nominees for the role of prime minister – Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi and Adnan al-Zurfi – failed to secure enough support among cabinet ministers.
This led to President Barham Salih appointing al-Kadhimi as prime minister-designate last month as the third candidate to form a cabinet.

ABOUT AL KADHIMI

He was born as Mustafa Abdellatif Mshatat in 1967 in the capital Baghdad.
He left Iraq in 1985 to Iran, before moving to Germany and the United Kingdom, which he later became a citizen of.

QUALIFICATION AND PROFESSIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS

He holds a bachelor’s degree in law and is better known for his work as a journalist, where he chose the title of al-Kadhimi.
He was known to oppose the rule of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
After the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, al-Kadhimi returned to Iraq and cofounded the Iraqi Media Network, running in parallel with his work as executive director of the Iraq Memory Foundation, an organisation founded for the purpose of documenting the crimes under Hussein’s Baath regime.
Al-Kadhimi also served as editor-in-chief of Iraq’s Newsweek magazine for three years from 2010. He is also an opinions writer as well as the editorof the Iraq section of the US-based Al-Monitor website.
In June 2016, al-Khadhimi took over the role of director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, in light of the intensification of the battles against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

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