Haider al-Abadi

Al-Abadi was born in Baghdad, the son of a neurosurgery hospital director and health ministry inspector general who was forced into retirement by the Ba'athist regime in 1979. He graduated from Baghdad's Central High School in 1970, took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Technology in 1975, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Manchester in 1980. He joined the Islamic Dawa Party in 1967; two of his brothers were executed and a third imprisoned for party membership. From 1977 he ran the party's organisation in Britain and remained in exile in London, working in transport engineering and consultancy, until the 2003 invasion. ¹

After 2003 al-Abadi was Minister of Communications in the first post-Saddam government (2003–2004), an adviser to the prime minister in 2005, and then a member of parliament for Baghdad, chairing the economy and finance committees. He was spoken of as a prime-ministerial candidate in 2006 and again in 2010. ¹

President Fuad Masum designated al-Abadi prime minister on 11 August 2014, after the Shia political parties nominated him as an alternative to Nouri al-Maliki; parliament approved his government on 8 September 2014. His premiership was dominated by the war against the Islamic State: he increased Sunni participation in government, struck a revenue-sharing agreement with the Kurds in December 2014, exposed 50,000 'ghost soldiers' on army payrolls, and in August 2015 unveiled an anti-corruption reform plan. In April 2016 supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr stormed parliament. On 9 December 2017 he announced victory over the Islamic State and the end of the war. Time magazine named him among its 100 most influential people of 2018. He was succeeded by Adel Abdul Mahdi on 25 October 2018. Neither his predecessor al-Maliki nor his successor Adel Abdul Mahdi has a museum record, so no succession edge is written. ^{1 2}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The English article says he was born to Shia parents, which is family background; the Arabic and Urdu infoboxes give his religion as Shia Islam and Wikidata carries the same generic value, but infobox fields and their structured echo are one source family, and his Dawa Party membership and nomination by Shia parties are party matters, not a personal attestation. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.