In office but not in powerAT ANY time, Haider al-Abadi would have made an unusual Middle Eastern leader. But his appointment in August 2014 as prime minister and head of the armed forces just two months after Mosul, Iraq’s second city, had fallen to the fearsome new armies of Islamic State (IS) seemed especially perverse. He had held no previous military post, and in his youth had dodged the draft. As a British exile, he fixed lifts for the BBC. But while Iraqis seemed content to leave the battle against IS to others, particularly the Iranian-backed Shia militias, they looked to him to right Iraq’s woefully corrupt state, which is divvied up between sectarian and Kurdish political blocs.
Fifteen months into the job, he has made many of the right noises. In contrast to his megalomaniac predecessor, Nuri al-Maliki, he goes walkabout, brushing aside his few guards so that people can take selfies with him. He handed the plane Iran gave Mr Maliki to the state airline. “We’ve started blowing some big fish out of the water,” he promised. And his political reform plans, unveiled in September, initially went down very well....Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1NDbWQq
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