Iraq’s newly elected president, Abdul Latif Jamal Rashid, joined the ranks of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the 1960s, before engaging with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the mid-1970s, within a student opposition movement.
Rashid was born on Aug. 10, 1944, in the Kurdistan region of Sulaymaniyah, where he completed his primary and secondary education. In 1962, he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he obtained a degree in civil engineering from the University of Liverpool in 1968, a master’s degree in water sciences, and later a doctorate from the University of Manchester in 1976.
Between his journeys in the two British cities, he spent years teaching at a university in his hometown, Sulaymaniyah.
Rashid worked with the British engineering consultancy firm, Sir William Halcrow & Partners, from 1971 to 1979, and participated in field projects in Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen, until 1981, including projects affiliated with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
According to his political biography, he became involved with Kurdish student opposition groups in Europe, which later led to the formation of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. He became the party’s delegate in Britain, and its representative in a number of countries in the Old Continent.
Rashid was also one of the members of the Kurdish delegations that participated in the Iraqi opposition conferences, which were seeking to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
After the US forces invaded Iraq and ousted the Baath regime, Rashid returned to Baghdad to be appointed Minister of Water Resources from 2003 until 2010, before becoming a senior advisor to the President of the Republic.
