Jalal Talabani

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017), the first Kurdish president of Iraq and one of the great Kurdish leaders of the twentieth century. Born in the village of Kelkan near Sulaymaniyah, he joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party under Mullah Mustafa Barzani at age thirteen. He studied law in Baghdad. He broke with the KDP in the 1960s over strategic differences and founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1975, leading the peshmerga campaigns from Sulaymaniyah. After 1991 he became a pillar of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was elected president of the Iraqi Republic in 2005 — the first Kurdish president in the history of an Arab country. He died in Berlin in 2017.