Barham Salih

Salih was born in Sulaymaniyah in 1960. As a young member of the Kurdish national movement he was arrested twice by the Ba'athist regime in 1979 and spent 43 days in detention in Kirkuk, where he was tortured; on his release he finished high school and left Iraq for the United Kingdom. He took a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and construction from Cardiff University in 1983 and a doctorate in statistics and computer applications in engineering from the University of Liverpool in 1987. ¹

Salih joined the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in late 1976, ran its European department and its London foreign relations, and after 1991 headed the PUK office in the United States. After 2003 he was deputy prime minister of the interim Iraqi government, minister of planning in 2005, and deputy prime minister in charge of the economic portfolio in Nouri al-Maliki's government, where he launched the International Compact with Iraq. He was prime minister of the Kurdistan Region from October 2009 to April 2012, having led the Kurdistani List in the 2009 election. In September 2017 he left the PUK to found the Coalition for Democracy and Justice, then returned to the PUK in September 2018, which nominated him for the presidency. On 2 April 2002 he survived an assassination attempt by Ansar al-Islam that killed the head of his private office and four bodyguards. ^{1 2}

Salih was elected president on 2 October 2018 with 219 votes against 22 for Fuad Hussein, succeeding Fuad Masum. In March 2019 he submitted the Yazidi Female Survivors Law to parliament, which was enacted on 1 March 2021. In December 2019 he offered his resignation rather than appoint Asaad al-Eidani as prime minister against the wishes of the protest movement. In October 2022 he lost his re-election bid to Abdul Latif Rashid. ¹

His faith is recorded as unknown. No article text names his school and no infobox carries a religion field for him; Wikidata gives a single value, Sunni Islam, and the Arabic and Urdu articles file him under Sunni Muslim categories, which are filings, not attestations. The Sunni reading is one source family short of the museum's two-source bar. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
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