Former Iraq President Jalal Talabani dies in Berlin

(3 Oct 2017) LEADIN:
Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi President, has died in a Berlin hospital.
STORYLINE:
Born in 1933, Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, from Iraq's Kurdish north, was sworn in as Iraq's new president on April 7, 2005, after decades of opposing Saddam Hussein.
Talabani, who led an armed uprising against Saddam, was chosen for the largely ceremonial presidential post after weeks of negotiations.
Talabani, who founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,(PUK) began fighting for Kurdish rights as a teenager and later led an armed resistance against Saddam's regime.
A Baghdad university law graduate, he began his political career in the early 1950's as a founder member and secretary general of the Kurdish Democaratic Party's Kurdistan Students Union.
As Talabani rose through the ranks of the KDP, subsequent differences with the leader of the party Massoud Barzani began to emerge, and in 1975 he along with several others founded the PUK.
The Talabani-Barzani rivalry dominated the Iraqi Kurdish political landscape for three decades.
Following the 1991 Gulf war and the declaration by the Western alliance of a no-fly zone and a safe haven for Kurds, elections were held in Iraqi Kurdistan and a PUK-KDP joint administration was established in 1992.
The tensions between the two groups were to prove insurmountable leading to armed conflict in 1994, which were only resolved in 1998 by a US brokered peace agreement signed by the two leaders in Washington.
Talabani's election came after the Kurdish-led coalition won 75 of the 275 parliament seats in the elections, a major victory for a group that spent years fighting Saddam's regime.
Kurds make up 20 percent of the country's 26 million people; Shiites make up 60 percent and the Sunni Arabs are roughly 15 percent to 20 percent.
Aside from electing the prime minister, the president's post is largely ceremonial.
As Iraqi President, Talabani made a landmark visit to Syria in January 2007, the first by an Iraqi head of state in nearly three decades, and part of an attempt to warm relations between the once Baathist rivals.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored in November 2006, after a gap of more than 20 years.
Talabani has been warmer towards Syria, where he lived for years in exile, than Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
He was received warmly by President Bashar Assad upon arrival in Damascus.
In 2012, he suffered a stroke and underwent treatment in Europe.
He returned to Iraq in 2014 and long-time supporters lined the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
Today, Kurdish officials have released news that he has died while in hospital in Berlin.

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