Jaafar al-Sadr

Mohammad Jafar al-Sadr (born 1970 in Najaf, Iraq ), is an Iraqi politician and diplomat currently serving as Iraq’s Permanent Representative to the International Maritime Organization and the Iraqi Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He is an independent politician.

Early life

Al-Sadr is the only son and one of six children of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shia cleric who was imprisoned, tortured and then executed by the government of Saddam Hussein in 1980, after he published a defense of the Iranian Revolution. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr is said to have been the ideological father of the Islamic Dawa Party.

Mohammad Jafar al-Sadr is the brother-in-law of Muqtada al-Sadr, who married his sister. He also has family ties to Mohammad Khatami, the former reformists President of Iran.

After the death of his father when he was eight, he moved to al-Kadhimiya in Baghdad where he went to school and studied law at Baghdad University. In 1998 he was arrested and his office closed down. He was put under house arrest and jailed for six months (sources differ on this). He has two son and four daughters.

Political life

He returned to Iraq after the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein - sources differ as to whether this was in 2003 or 2009.

He resigned from parliament in February 2011, to protest at the deterioration in services and the system of "patronage and cronyism". Veteran Shiite Arab politician Adil Abdul-Mahdi was eventually elected Prime Minister. He was appointed the Iraqi ambassador to the United Kingdom in 2019.

Following the 2021 election, he was again nominated to the Prime Ministership by the "Save the Homeland Alliance", which brought together three of the four largest parties - the Sadrist Movement, the Kurdistan Democratic Party the Sunni Arab majority Progress Party.