President Jalal Talabani Battles and wars Iran–Iraq War Name Wafiq Al-Samarrai | Battles/wars Iran-Iraq War President Saddam Hussein Service/branch Iraqi Army | |
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Born July 1, 1947 (age 76)
Samarra, Iraq ( 1947-07-01 ) Allegiance Baathist Iraq (to 1994)
INC (to 2003) Profiles | ||
Wafiq al-Samarrai (born 1 July 1947) is an Iraqi general formerly chief of Iraqi general military intelligence born in the region of Samarra.
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Military career
Al-Samarrai served in Iraqi Intelligence during the Iran-Iraq war, and was appointed head of Military Intelligence Agency in 1990.
Defection
He defected in December 1994 and drove up to Kirkuk, then walked for 30 hours to cross the frontier into the Northern Kurdish enclave. At first he allied himself with Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. They fomented a mini war in March 1995 between Kurdish groups and the Iraqi Army that went wrong when the insurgents failed to secure American military air support. Al-Samarrai moved to Syria and eventually made his way to London in 1998, where he headed an opposition group called the Higher Council for National Salvation whuch is based in Denmark.
Following his defection, Qusay Hussein told senior Iraqi officials, including Ra'ad al-Hamdani, that al-Samarrai had been an undercover agent for Jalal Talabani and Iran since 1982. Former Maj. Gen. Mizher Rashid al-Tarfa al-Ubaydi of Iraqi Intelligence claimed that al-Samarrai fled because he believed he was about to be arrested.
Post Invasion of Iraq
In 2003, he returned to his hometown Samarra, Iraq and remained there until he was appointed as the national security advisor to President Jalal Talabani in 2005 and moved to the Green Zone in Baghdad.
On March 6, 2008, the Iraqi presidency website publicized a judicial decision to lift off all restrictions imposed on General Wafiq al-Samarrai, including a freeze on his assets, after Supreme Criminal Court Judge Adnan Al Badri reportedly announced that a probe found no evidence to implicating al-Samarrai in 1991 Iraqi Army attacks on Kurdish and Shia civilians.
However, Samarrai left for London and announced that he will not return to Iraq in the future.