Ahmed Chalabi

Ahmed Chalabi

Dr. Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (احمد الجلبي) (born 1945) is part of a three-man leadership council for the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was created for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and which has received major funding and assistance from the United States. Chalabi is a highly controversial figure with his supporters, many of whom are neoconservatives within The Pentagon supposedly holding him up as the hope for democracy in Iraq, and his opponents, which include some in the United States government, seeing him as a charlatan of questionable background, who is out of touch with Iraq and who has no real power base there.

Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has mostly lived in the U.S. and United Kingdom since that time. He was involved in organizing a resistance movement among Kurds in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s.

In 1977 he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan; after the bank's failure Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for Bank fraud by a Jordanian court.[1] He reportedly fled the country in the trunk of a car to escape - an episode which led to jokes among Iraqis (such as when Chalabi was quoted as saying that neighboring countries should "close all the borders" to Iraq, if they were to take him up on that he'd have to find a different way to sneak out of the country when it becomes necessary).

Chalbi maintains that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him.

As American forces took control during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, Chalabi was given a position on the Iraq interim governing council by the Coalition Provisional Authority. He served as president of the council in September 2003.