Talabani leads renaissance of Iraqi Kurds

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The new President is a burly, mercurial figure who has shown great ability to survive numerous setbacks and defeats in the past. He is expected to live in the mansion in Baghdad formerly occupied by Barzan al-Tikriti, the half-brother of Saddam Hussein who is now in prison. Mr Talabani is believed to have brought 3,000 peshmerga, elite Kurdish soldiers who are now members of the Iraqi army, as his bodyguard in Baghdad. Mr Talabani is likely to play a far more powerful role than his predecessor, Ghazi al-Yawer, who will be one of his deputies. He already has the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a powerful political and military organization, under his command. Since the Gulf War in 1991 he has ruled half of Kurdistan and in 1993 his forces attacked and captured the oil city of Kirkuk. He rose to influence as a lieutenant of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the founding father of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq. He joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party at the age of 13, trained as a lawyer and by 1958, when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown, he was in the inner circle of the party. At the time of the great Kurdish defeat in 1975 - after the Kurds were treacherously abandoned by the US and the Shah of Iran - Mr Talabani broke away to form his own party called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. For years he competed with Massoud Barzani, the present leader of the KDP, a rivalry which periodically led to heavy fighting and, in the 1990s, to civil war in Kurdistan.