Ahmed Chalabi, key advocate for US invasion of Iraq, dies

Chalabi was widely seen as the man who helped push the US into invading Iraq in 2003 with information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme.

Ahmed Chalabi died on November 3, 2015 of a heart attack, according to Iraqi state television. Ahmed Saad / Reuters

Baghdad // Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, a key lobbyist for the US invasion of Iraq who was blamed for providing false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify it, died of a heart attack on Tuesday.

Chalabi, a 71-year-old lawmaker who headed the finance committee, died of a heart attack on Tuesday morning, parliament said in a statement offering condolences for his death.

The interior ministry issued a statement paying tribute to Chalabi’s work for the “salvation of the Iraqi people from dictatorship”.

Living in exile as head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which opposed Saddam Hussein, Chalabi became a White House favourite for information he provided which supported the US justification for attacking Iraq in 2003.

But he lost favour after the invasion when much of his information regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda turned out to be false.

He was also accused of providing information to Iran.

Iraqi police and US forces raided his home in May 2004 and seized documents and computers. The only formal charge was putting forged banknotes into circulation after the raid turned up a small number in his home.

Chalabi has also long been dogged by allegations of corruption and was convicted by a Jordanian court of embezzling funds from the collapsed Petra bank in 1992, a case he claims was politically motivated.

Born in October 1944 to a wealthy Baghdad family, Chalabi left the country in 1956 and spent most of his life in Britain and the United States, where he received a doctorate in mathematics.

He organised a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s but hundreds of people were killed and he later fled, returning only when US-led invading forces took control.

Undaunted, he provided a steady stream of briefings which were used to bolster the case for the 2003 war and his INC party provided a volunteer force which fought under US command during the invasion.

Key figures in US president George W Bush’s administration hoped Chalabi and the INC might take over Iraq as an interim government after the fall of Saddam.

But because of its long years outside Iraq, his group was little-known and little-liked at home. Plans for a smooth and easy political transition fell apart, and instead Iraq was plagued by years of bloodshed.

Chalabi held the rotating presidency of the US-appointed Iraqi governing council after the invasion, served as deputy prime minister and also temporarily held the key oil portfolio, but he never reached the political heights to which he aspired.

Following the invasion, Chalabi, a secular Shiite, was one of the main proponents of the “de-Baathification” drive to remove alleged Saddam supporters from public life. The move alienated Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority and fuelled the revolt against US-led occupation forces.

Subsequent government policies further disenchanted Sunnis, and anger within the community ultimately laid the groundwork for the ISIL extremist group’s seizure of large parts of the country last year.

* Agence France-Presse