Ahmed Chalabi - Background

Background

Chalabi is the son of a prominent Shi'a family, one of the wealthy power elite of Baghdad, where he was born. Chalabi left Iraq with his family in 1956 and spent most of his life in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the mid-1960s, he studied with cryptographer Whitfield Diffie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics. In 1969, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of George Glauberman, after which he took a position in the mathematics department at the American University of Beirut. He published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, in the field of abstract algebra. His Erdős number is 6.

In 1971, Chalabi married Leila Osseiran, daughter of Lebanese politician Adil Osseiran. They have four children.

In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan. In the late 1980s, the government of Jordan issued a decree ordering all banks in the country to deposit one fifth of their reserves with the Central Bank. Petra Bank was the only bank that was unable to meet this requirement and Chalabi fled the country before the authorities could react. Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal. He faces 22 years in prison, should he again enter Jordan. Chalabi maintains that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him. In May 2005, it was reported that King Abdullah II of Jordan had promised to pardon Chalabi, in part to ease the relations between Jordan and the new Iraqi government of which Chalabi was a member. According to one report, Chalabi proposed a $32 million compensation fund for depositers affected by Petra Bank's failure. The website for Petra Bank contains a press release stating that Chalabi would refuse the pardon. Although he has always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited later when the U.S. State Department raised questions about the INC's accounting practices. According to The New York Times, "Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give."

Chalabi was also part of a three-man executive council for the umbrella Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), created in 1992 for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Although the INC received major funding and assistance from the United States, it never had any influence or any following to speak of in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The INC's influence gradually waned until the December 2005 elections, in which it failed to win a single seat in Parliament.

He was involved in organizing a resistance movement among Kurds in northern Iraq in the early mid-1990s. When that effort was crushed and hundreds of his supporters were killed, Chalabi fled the country. Chalabi lobbied in Washington for the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (passed October 1998), which earmarked US$97 million to support Iraqi opposition groups, virtually all of which was funneled through the INC.

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