As he stepped into office in 2005 to become Iraq’s first Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani told his followers, “I am casting off my Kurdish clothes and wearing Iraqi ones instead. You must accept that.” It was a symbolic call for unity- A longtime leader of Kurdish fighters, Talabani became the head of state of what was supposed to be a new Iraq, freed two years earlier from the rule of Saddam Hussein.
Talabani’s death on Tuesday was a reminder of how that experiment in unity has frayed nearly to the point of unravelling — Only a week earlier, Kurds voted overwhelmingly in a referendum in support of breaking away from Iraq to form an independent state, sending tensions spiralling with the central government in Baghdad and with Iraq’s neighbors, who fear similar Kurdish separatist sentiment on their soil.
With him die unity hopes too
At the time of the vote, Talabani had been out of politics for nearly five years after a 2012 stroke left him debilitated and permanently hospitalized. He died in a Berlin hospital at the age of 83 after his condition rapidly deteriorated, according to Marwan Talabani, a relative and senior official in the office of Talabani’s son and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Kurdish region Qabad Talabani. While in power, Talabani was seen as a unifying elder statesman who could soothe tempers among Iraq’s Shias, Sunnis and Kurds. But the country’s centrifugal forces only accelerated after he was hospitalized as Iraq battled the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group and faced growing demands for Kurdish independence.
The referendum vote, which was led by his long-time Kurdish rival, regional President Masoud Barzani, is not expected to lead to a Kurdish state anytime soon and has further isolated the small land-locked region. Iraq and its neighbours have rejected the vote, and Baghdad has banned international flights and threatened to take control of the autonomous Kurdish region’s borders.
“If Talabani had been President of Iraq today for sure the approach would have been different, the balance in Kurdistan would have been different. I don’t think it would have come to a referendum in the first place,” said Joost Hiltermann, of the International Crisis Group.
“Basically with Talabani’s incapacitation [Kurdish] strength in Baghdad diminished and ... the weight shifted decisively to Barzani and the Kurdish region,” he said.
Talabani came from a generation of Kurdish leaders, who spent decades fighting for self-rule and whose people were often brutally repressed by the central government.
Born in a tiny village north of the city of Irbil on November 12, 1933, Talabani was in his early teens when he joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, the main Kurdish political force at the time trying to carve out an autonomous homeland for Iraq’s Kurds.
