Mithal al-Alusi

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Mithal Jamal Hussein al-Alusi (born 1954) is an Iraqi politician and the leader of the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation, DPIN. He was elected to the Iraqi Council of Representatives as an independent in the December 2005 election. He is a Sunni Muslim Arab secularist politician and supports a close alliance with the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel.

Al-Alusi hails from a very prominent Iraqi Sunni family from restive Anbar Province, and his father was a renowned scholar and Baghdad University professor of Classical Arabic literature.

In 1976, Saddam Hussein ordered al-Alusi's execution in absentia while the latter was studying in Cairo. Alusi was then a member of the Ba'ath Party, but had been aligned with opponents of Saddam within the party such as Abdel-Khaliq Al-Samara'i, who was himself killed by the security services. Alusi went into exile in Germany and worked as a businessman. He was involved in the takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Berlin in December 2002 to protest Saddam's tyranny, and was sentenced to imprisonment by German authorities. His sentence was later reduced to house arrest. He escaped from Germany and returned to Iraq in October 2003 and joined the Iraqi National Congress. [1]

After the invasion of Iraq, Alusi was appointed the General Director of Culture and Media at the Higher National Commission for De-Baathification.

In September 2004, after making a public visit to Israel, al-Alusi was expelled from the Iraqi National Congress and sacked from his job at the De-Baathification Commission. This led him to establish the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation, which ran in the January 2005 election. It received only 4,500, far from enough to gain a seat in the Council of Representatives. However, his list won enough votes to obtain one seat for Baghdad Province in the December 2005 election.

On February 19, 2005, Al-Alusi's car was ambushed by armed assailants in the Hayy Al-Jami'a neighborhood of Baghdad. His two sons Ayman, 30, and Jamal, 22, were killed in the attack, as well as one of his bodyguards.