Salih, Barham

(1960- )

   Barham Salih is an articulate and moderate deputy secretary-general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) who earlier returned from his post as the PUK representative in the United States and became the prime minister of the PUK administration in Sulaymaniya on 21 January 2001, serving until 4 July 2004. He then became deputy prime minister of the Iraqi interim (and then in 2006 permanent) government of Nouri al-Maliki. He resigned from this post in 2009 to head the PUK electoral ticket in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) elections held on 25 July 2009. Although the PUK did rather poorly in these elections, he was chosen as the new prime minister of the KRG according to an understanding previously reached between the PUK and Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). He speaks flawless English and is popular in Western capitals because of his competency. However, as a protege of Jalal Talabani, he has yet to prove that he has an independent powerbase in the KRG or PUK.

   Barham Salih joined the PUK in 1976 and was arrested on two separate occasions by Iraqi security agents before leaving Iraq in 1979 for Great Britain. He received a Ph.D. in statistics and computer modeling from the University of Liverpool. In 1985, he became the PUK spokesman in Britain. He assumed a similar position in the United States in 1991 where he served for 10 years before returning to northern Iraq. Shortly afterward, in the spring of 2002, Barham Salih just missed being assassinated by agents of Ansar al-Islam, an extremist Islamic group.