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Iraq’s Former President Jalal Talabani Passes Away

Berlin (October 4, 2017): Iraq’s former President and Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani has passed away at the age of 84 in Germany.    

He was Iraq’s president from 2005 to 2014 and a key figure in the Kurdish region of Iraq. “Our leader died in Germany,” an official with Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said on Tuesday.

A family member said Talabani’s health had taken a turn for the worse and he been transported to Germany, along with his wife and two children. Talabani was one of the longest-serving figures in contemporary Iraqi Kurdish politics, but for much of the past 40 years, he opposed successive governments in Baghdad.

Talabani’s death, following a decades-old struggle for Kurdish statehood, came after Iraq’s Kurds voted 92.7 percent to split from Iraq in the September 25 referendum.

The vote, rejected by the Iraqi central government as illegal, has put a deep strain on ties between the Kurds and central Iraqi authorities, who have cut off international flights to the region and threatened further action.

Talabani was an avuncular politician and a skilled negotiator, who spent years building bridges between the country’s divided factions, despite his efforts for Kurdish independence. Talabani was born in 1933 in the mountain village of Kalkan, he studied law at Baghdad University.

In 1956, while still a student he went into hiding to evade arrest for his political role as founder and secretary-general of the Kurdistan Student Union. After graduating from law school in 1959, he was called to serve in the Iraqi army where he commanded a tank unit.

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