BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the 58-year-old politician in line to become Iraq's next prime minister, spent more than two decades in exile, mostly in Iran, leading anti-Saddam Hussein opposition forces following a bloody crackdown by the Iraqi dictator against Shiite Muslims.
Al-Jaafari, one of the top leaders of the Islamic Dawa Party, fled to Iran in 1979 and remained there until 1990, organizing cross-border attacks while studying Shiite theology in the city of Qom. He was seen as the leader of a pro-Tehran faction of the Dawa with close ties to the country's clerical government -- though he denies any such links.
The Dawa was Iraq's first Shiite political party, headed by one of its most popular clerics, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Sadr, who was executed by Saddam's regime in 1980. The Dawa Party uprising began in the late 1970s and was crushed by Saddam's forces in 1982. The group said it lost 77,000 members in its war against the Iraqi dictator, a Sunni Muslim.
In the early 1980s, Dawa carried out several suicide bombings in Baghdad, and there was speculation that al-Jaafari was behind an attempted assassination of the then Iraqi-allied emir of Kuwait. He has denied involvement in the attack.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-iraq-al-jaafari-profile,0,2226418.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
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