Jalal Talabani, the first Kurdish president of Iraq died on 3rd Oct 2017.
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 neighbours, who fear similar Kurdish separatist sentiment on their soil.
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.
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.
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.
