AHMED CHALABI’S downfall had been declared so many times that Iraqis are struggling to believe that the end of his extraordinary career has occurred through natural rather than political causes. His family, who ran Iraq’s largest bank under the British-backed monarchy, fled the country with the toppling of the Hashemite king in 1958. In 1989 he then fled Jordan in the boot of a prince’s car, accused of cooking the books of the kingdom’s second bank, Petra. Resurrecting himself as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-financed opposition front, he fled Kurdistan during Saddam Hussein’s brief offensive on the Western-protected enclave in the mid-1990s. And when the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 and flew his armed followers to an airfield near Nasiriya, in southern Iraq, the fighters got lost on their way into town.
Paul Bremer, America’s administrator, parachuted him into his fledgling cabinet, the Governing Council, a 13-man body composed largely of exiles, but then stripped him of his post and arrested his associates for dealing too closely for their liking with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He won a mere 0.5% of the vote in...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1HprzWW
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