(U) DIYALA REPRESENTATIVES' BIOS

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 KIRKUK 000062 SIPDIS SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: DEATH OF NAMED PERSONS TAGS: PINR PGOV KDEM IZ SUBJECT: (U) DIYALA REPRESENTATIVES' BIOS KIRKUK 00000062 001.2 OF 002 CLASSIFIED BY: Scott Dean, Acting Regional Coordinator, REO Kirkuk, DoS. REASON: 1.4 (b),(d) ¶1. (U) This is a SET Ba'qubah cable. ¶2. (C) SUMMARY: SET has collected background information on nine of the ten representatives elected from Diyala province in the December 2005 elections. These representatives-elect share virtually no common characteristics, but their backgrounds reveal a little about the priorities and electoral strategies of their respective blocs. With a notable exception, Diyala's representatives seem likely to remain in backbencher roles in the soon-to-be-formed Council of Representatives. END SUMMARY. 555 LIST REVEALS STRONG HAND OF SHI'A INDEPENDENTS IN DIYALA -------------- -------------- ¶3. (SBU) Taha Dira' Taha al-Sa'di is an independent aligned in national politics with Hussein al-Shahristani; he graduated in 1989 from Baghdad University with a BS in Economics and taught high school in Ba'qubah until regime change. He became involved in politics through his activities to promote civil society in Diyala as a founding member of the Diyala-based al-Nur cultural/charity organization and the associated al-Huda and Elaph organizations. (Al-Nur organization members took two of the top three slots on the 555 list, and at least three of the top six slots.) Taha Dira' is from the predominantly Shi'a village of al-Sa'diya, in the far west of the province. ¶4. (U) Falah Faisal Fahad al-Fayad is a Da'wa member from the predominantly Shi'a village of Jadidat al-Shat, also in the far west of the province. IIP AND SHEIKHS DOMINATE TAWAFUQ LIST -------------- ¶5. (C) Amer Habib al-Khayzaran al-'Azzawi is the youngest brother in a very prominent family of 'Azzawi sheikhs based in Dali Abbas (a town north of the central city of Muqdadiyah); his grandfather and father were imprisoned in India for rebelling against the British, which made them folk heroes once Iraq gained its independence. His (much) older brother Faisal (now deceased) was one of the members of the founding Ba'ath Party council in the late 1950s. Another older brother Nizar, current paramount sheikh of the Azza' tribe, was a member of the Transitional National Assembly from Allawi's list, but ran on a minor list in the December elections and didn't win a seat. Sheikh Amer is generally considered to be the only member of his family who takes Islam seriously; he was one of the top members of the Diyala IIP sheikhs' council. ¶6. (C) Dr. Salim Abdullah Ahmed al-Juburi is one of the Diyala IIP's ten-member leadership council. The former director of the Diyala IECI, he was removed on suspicion of packing the IECI with IIP cadres. More recently, he was selected to be one of the Sunni representatives on the Constitution-drafting committee; presumably, his PhD in international law from Baghdad University was an important qualification for this. He is also the chief of the legal department of the national IIP. He lives in the central, IIP stronghold city of Muqdadiyah. ¶7. (C) Taysir Najih Awad al-Mashhadani is a mechanical engineer who heads the Engines Department at Diyala Electric Industries, a state-owned enterprise in Ba'qubah. She also heads the IIP women's organization in the northwestern qadaa (district) of Khalis, and is the wife of Hisham Ali Khalaf, a member of the leadership council of the IIP branch in Khalis. Taysir and Hisham live in the town of al-Ghalibiya, in Khalis qadaa (district). ¶8. (C) Mudhher Sa'dun Awad al-Juburi is the heir apparent to one of the two most prominent families of Juburi sheikhs in Diyala; his family is said to be more respected than the other Juburi family (the al-Hamadeh, headed by Sheikh Mutlaq al-Juburi) because it had fewer ties to the Saddam regime. Sheikh Mudhher, an independent, lives in the central, IIP stronghold city of Muqdadiyah. MARGINAL KURDISH AND ALLAWI CANDIDATES -------------- ¶9. (C) Hussam Abdulkarim Abdali al-Azzawi is a former officer in Saddam's armed forces, who retired in 2000. He claims to have begun listening to Future Radio in the late '90s, leading to his resignation from the armed forces. After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, he made his way to Baghdad and linked up with Iyad Allawi, returning to Ba'qubah to found the Diyala KIRKUK 00000062 002.2 OF 002 branch of the Iraqi National Accord - an organization that is almost entirely inactive in Diyala province. ¶10. (C) Sirwan Adnan Mirza, the first person on the Kurdistan Brotherhood List in Diyala province, is a KDP member in his mid-to-late twenties. Originally from the northeastern, primarily Kurdish city of Khanaqin, he spent his formative years north of the Green Line in Kalar (in southern Sulaymaniyah), after his parents fled after the 1991 war. He is now studying towards his second masters' degree at Salahuddin University in Erbil, writing his thesis on financial corruption. Sirwan spends most of his time in Erbil when he is not in Baghdad, but his family has recently moved back to their ancestral village of Aliyawa, now basically a neighborhood of Khanaqin. ¶11. (C) Yusif Ahmed Mustafa was the Director of PUK Khanaqin media relations and publisher of the monthly magazine "Khanaqin" prior to being tapped by the PUK in mid-2005 to be a CoR candidate and attending training sessions in Ankara (Turkish-sponsored) and Sulaymaniyah (US-sponsored). Yusif claims to have been an underground recruiter for the PUK Peshmerga while studying at Baghdad University for a degree between 1980 and 1986. He then assumed a career as an agricultural engineer until the 1991 war, after which he fled north of the Green Line and became a mineral water factory director. In 1999, he was made an advisor to the KRG-Sulaymaniyah Minister of Industry and then in 2000 became a liaison with humanitarian NGO's working north of the Green Line until coming south in April 2003 with the advancing Peshmerga. His family, however, has remained behind in the southern Sulaymaniyah city of Darbandikhan. COMMENT -------------- ¶12. (C) COMMENT: The only thing more striking about Diyala's new crop of representatives than their diversity is their obscurity within the province. With the conspicuous exception of the Tawaffuq list, all parties appear to have been betting on voters' support for the party rather than for individual candidates on the ticket. An extreme example of this policy is the selection of the unproven Sirwan Adnan Mirza as the top Kurdish candidate; he seems very bright and well-spoken, but it is difficult to suppress the idea that the KDP views the Council of Representatives as a training ground for the "real work" of governing the KRG. Similarly, the PUK appears to have reached pretty far into its roster to come up with its candidate for the Council, and very few of our Shi'a contacts admit to knowing anything about either of the successful 555 candidates. ¶13. (C) Tawaffuq's strategy is a notable exception in a few ways. Unlike the other lists, it was able to attract - and chose to attract - well-known and powerful people from the Sunni Arabs who form its primary constituency. Unlike the other lists, it did not make any attempt to provide balance at the top of the list - the IIP took the top three seats, which were the only ones that the list could reasonably count on. Finally, Tawaffuq's list is notable in that it contains, in Dr. Salim al-Juburi, the only Diyala representative likely to make much of a splash at the national level. END COMMENT. ORESTE