Daily Times

Iraq’s Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Tawfik Allawi has submitted a request to the British ambassador in Baghdad, relinquishing his British citizenship.

“Following my assumption as the Prime Minister of Iraq, I’m giving up my citizenship of any foreign country,” Allawi said in an official message to the UK ambassador.

In a related issue, the Iraqi parliament’s speaker, Mohamed al-Halbousi, recently ordered that the heads of the council blocs “to postpone a vote session to grant confidence to Allawi’s new cabinet until next Saturday.” The session was originally scheduled to take place on Thursday.

The vote was reported to have been delayed after Shia blocs supporting Allawi and the Kurdish, and Sunni blocs could not overcome their differences.

On October 2, the Iraqi parliament elected Barham Salih, 58, who is a veteran Kurdish politician, as the president of Iraq for the next four years.

Salih was born in the city of Sulaimaniyah in northeastern Iraq. He was former prime minister of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan from 2001 to 2004. Later, he became deputy prime minister of the federal government and occupied many ministerial posts in Baghdad and Erbil in the last 15 years.