In his twenties, Al-Aidani fled to Iran out of fear of falling into the hands of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Hussein’s regime was hunting down participants in the popular uprising that erupted in early March 1991, later known as the ‘popular uprising’. Although Al-Aidani did not participate in this uprising, a few months later, he returned to Basra, taking advantage of a general amnesty issued the same year. But that escape, which at the time appeared to be an attempt at survival, later became his gateway to the world of leadership.
Asaad Abdul Amir Abdul Ghaffar Mahawi Al-Aidani, born in 1967 in the village of al-Ajirawiya in Shatt al-Arab district, east of Basra, could not have imagined that leaving the city in March 1991 and staying for a few months in Iran would be the first step in his political rise.
The man who returned to his city a few months later is today the leader of an influential political alliance, which both his allies and opponents calculate has a thousand accounts. Although the winds have sometimes turned against him, Al-Aidani understood the rules of the game, even those he never wished to master.
The early years of Al-Aidani
Asaad al-Aidani completed his primary and secondary education in Basra, before enrolling in the Faculty of Engineering/Electrical Department at the University of Basra, where he specialised in communications electronics engineering.
During his university studies, the People’s Uprising erupted in early March 1991, forcing him to flee to Iran, along with many other Basra residents who fled for fear of repression by the regime’s security services and forces against participants in the uprising. In Iran, Al-Aidani met two young men from his city, a cousin named Mohammed and another named Miqdad. A few months later, he returned to Basra, taking advantage of the amnesty, to resume his university studies.
In 1993, he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electricity. He then joined the compulsory military service in the Iraqi army, which was imposed on men before the fall of the regime in 2003.
Al-Aidani spent 18 months in the armed forces until he was dismissed. Shortly after his demissal, he reunited with Mohammed and Miqdad, who had joined Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC).
They had returned to Basra on a special mission from the INC leadership with a listening device used to intercept calls from the security services, with the aim of sending reports to the INC leadership based in northern Iraq.
Due to a technical fault with the device, they enlisted al-Aidani, a telecommunications engineer, to fix it. He did not know that they had joined the opposition, nor the nature of their mission.
Once he arrived at the apartment that his two companions had used as a temporary headquarters, Al-Aidani was able to switch on the device. However, the signal was soon detected by the radio signal monitoring unit of the Basra Post and Telecommunications Department. In coordination with the security services, their location was revealed.
Forces surrounded the neighbourhood where the apartment was located. they arrested the three men and transferred them to Baghdad.
They were brought to trial and sentenced to death by hanging. Eventually Al-Aidani’s sentence was reduced to life imprisonment due to his lack of prior knowledge of the nature of the mission and because he was not involved in the cell.
Al-Aidani was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, where he was placed in the special provisions section and spent nearly seven years. He was granted a presidential pardon as part of the general amnesty announced by Saddam Hussein on 20 October 2002 and returned to Basra to start a new chapter in his life.
Turning Point
On 20 March 2003, US forces invaded Iraq. They were eventually joined by international coalition forces, resulting in the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Asaad Al-Aidani travelled from Basra to Baghdad, heading to the hunting club in the Mansour neighbourhood, which was the headquarters of the INC, hoping to meet its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, in order to get a chance in the new political scene.
He was unable to meet Chalabi, and instead met with his right-hand man Aras Habib Karim, now the secretary general of the INC.
During his meeting with Aras, Al-Aidani was surprised that the latter knew him by name. It transpired it was not through personal acquaintance. Aras knew that he had previously been arrested along with two other Congress members sent on a secret mission to Basra, and that he had been sentenced with them.
Al-Aidani did not realise that the details of the case, including the circumstances of the arrest and sentencing, had been relayed to the Congress leadership by special sources.
After that meeting, Aras tasked Al-Aidani with opening an INC headquarters in Basra, officially representing the organisation there, and working to attract people from the city to join the organisation.
Al-Aidani returned to Basra, opened a headquarters for the INC, and began to exercise his duties in charge of its organisations in the province. This was in addition to his work in the office of the De-Baathification Commission in Basra when it was established.
This official representation of the INC later qualified him for membership in the Political Consultative Council in Basra, which was established following the fall of the regime in April 2003. It included representatives of all political forces in the province, before the first provincial council elections were organised.
This council still exists today under the title “Basra Political Council”.
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Al-Eidani made multiple attempts to win membership of the Basra Provincial Council and the Iraqi Council of Representatives between 2005 and 2014, but he did not succeed in gaining the required number of votes.
During this period, he turned to commercial work and managed to build up a good financial fortune after being destitute. This reality is contrary to what he and his supporters propagated that his family was indeed well-off before April 2003.
His activities during this period included some work in the banking and contracting sectors, in addition to buying agricultural land, bulldozing it, dividing it into small plots, and selling it as residential land.
After a series of electoral failures, Al-Aidani seemed realise that the road to victory through the ballot box was not easy, and that he needed to resort to other methods to strengthen his political and popular presence at the same time.
Despite his close ties to a number of pro-Iranian political forces in Basra, he also worked to move closer to the US side.
In late 2016, he held a luncheon at an orchard he owned in Abu al-Khasib district, south of Basra, in honour of the former US Consul General in Basra, Wayne Dayton, and his entourage. The aim was to gain political support in order to enhance his chances in the upcoming scene.
At the grassroots level, he has contributed to providing material and moral support for some activities and initiatives. These include the announcement in early 2017 that the Secretary General of the Iraqi National Congress Party, Aras Habib Karim, and Al-Bilad Islamic Bank, owned by the latter, donated medical supplies worth 200 million Iraqi dinars to the Central Children’s Hospital in Basra.
The Golden Opportunity
On the evening of 10 August 2017, the former governor of Basra, Majid al-Nasrawi, announced his resignation from his position during the opening ceremony of the Martyr Mohammed Baqer al-Sadr Bridge. Immediately after the ceremony, he left the country for Iran, escaping accountability for corruption charges in which he was implicated.
This event presented a golden opportunity for Asad Al-Aidani, who had previously had no ambition to become governor of Basra.
In an attempt to absorb popular anger after the wave of protests that erupted in mid-2015 and continued until the moment of his resignation, the Basra Provincial Council quickly opened the door for candidates to run for the position of governor.
Dozens of Basra residents submitted their candidacy files, unaware that a game was being played behind the scenes.
The position of governor was assigned to Ammar al-Hakim’s Wisdom Movement, according to the political consensus at the time. The Movement’s choices could not be overridden when selecting the new governor.
Therefore, the Wisdom Movement formed a tripartite committee at its headquarters in Baghdad – headed by leader Ahmed al-Fatlawi, with the membership of Baligh Abu Kallal and a third person – to choose a replacement for Al-Nasrawi from outside the official list of candidates and from outside the movement’s organisations. The intention was that this candidate would serve as a ‘scapegoat’, given that local elections were scheduled for mid-2017.
However, the elections were postponed due to the national security situation caused by the presence of ISIS which led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of residents of the western governorates.
Based on an agreement between political forces, it was decided that the provincial council elections would be held alongside parliamentary elections in May 2018.
Accordingly, on 13 June 2017, the Higher Coordinating Body between the provinces announced a decision to extend the mandate of the provincial councils until the elections are held, based on Article 46/III of the Provincial Councils Elections Law No. 36 of 2008.
The term of the new governor – Al-Nasrawi’s replacement – lasted only six to eight months, which prompted the Wisdom Movement to look for a figure who could be sacrificed.
Three figures were nominated to the committee, which interviewed them individually, but did not find them acceptable.
Waleed Hamid Kaitan, then deputy chairman of the Basra provincial council, who was the head of the Wisdom Movement’s bloc in the council, put forward the name of Asaad Al-Aidani to committee chairman Ahmad al-Fatlawi as an alternative candidate.
A meeting was held between Kaitan, Al-Fatlawi and Al-Aidani, which ended with the official adoption of Al-Aidani’s candidacy by the Wisdom Movement for the position of governor, as part of the political consensus within the council.
At the time, it was reported that Kaitan was seeking to finance his Basra Mall investment project. It was also claimed that he had made an agreement with Al-Aidani to guarantee his victory as governor in exchange for Kaitan receiving a loan from Al-Bilad Islamic Bank worth between three and five million dollars.
The bank is owned by the Secretary General of the Iraqi National Congress Party, Aras Habib Karim and his partners. Al- Aidani’s wife managed the bank’s Basra branch at the time.
The Basra Provincial Council held an extraordinary session on 27 August 2017, chaired by Kaitan, to select the governor from among 51 candidates who had officially submitted their files.
None of the candidates were aware of what went on behind the scenes, except for Al-Aidani, who attended the session knowing in advance that he was the winner.
He received 24 out of 27 votes. One member has voted for himself because he was one of the candidates. One vote went to another candidate. A final member abstained from voting.
On 11 September 2017, then-President Barham Salih issued a presidential decree appointing Al-Aidani as governor of Basra.
Al-Aidani was sworn in by the president of the Basra Court of Appeals and officially began his duties.
At the beginning of his tenure, Al-Aidani faced major challenges, most notably the stoppage of a number of projects, due to his flight and the lack of financial allocations.
He sought to persuade former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to issue a decision allowing the resumption of these projects, arguing that they were urgently needed and that some of them had been partially implemented.
He succeeded in doing so, especially since Basra was experiencing high tension, which could have led to a popular explosion that would affect the entire Iraqi scene.
One of the most prominent projects he restarted was the Qibla sewerage project, which was later expanded to include infrastructure work in the densely populated Qibla area.
As the provision of services improved, Al-Aidani’s popularity began to rise. He later won the 2018 parliamentary elections, after running as part of Al-Abadi’s Al-Nasr coalition.
However, Al-Aidani decided to remain in his position as governor of Basra and did not take the constitutional oath as a deputy, even after the Federal Court certified the election results on 9 August 2018.
This came after Abadi announced, in July of the same year, the allocation of 3.5 trillion dinars for infrastructure projects in Basra, following widespread popular protests over the deterioration of services.
This decision made Al-Aidani prefer to remain in the local authority, which prevented the activation of the victory of the alternative candidate, Farouk Hilal Juma’a, who was due to occupy the parliamentary seat if Al-Aidani left.
Despite Al-Aidani’s repeated announcements of his willingness to give up the seat, and the alternative candidate’s continuous demands, he procrastinated and stalled, maintaining the status quo.
Staying in office
The enactment of the Provincial and District Councils Elections Law No. 12 of 2018, published in the Iraqi Gazette (No. 4494 of 4 June 2018), extended the work of provincial councils until new councils are elected, as stipulated in Article 44(3) of the law.
In the same context, on 14 July 2018, outgoing Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the release of 3.5 trillion dinars for infrastructure projects in Basra, coinciding with the Federal Court’s announcement on 19 August of the same year, which certified the results of the parliamentary elections.
These developments increased the pressure on Asaad Al-Aidani from several political parties, primarily the Wisdom Movement, which began to sense the potential loss of his power in one of Iraq’s most important provinces. This was further heightened after Adel Abdul Mahdi and members of his government were sworn in on 25 October 2018.
The Hikma Movement felt that Al-Aidani had reneged on the promises he had made when he was nominated as governor in late 2017. They began attempts to remove him by persuading members of the provincial council to vote on a resolution to dismiss him, in preparation for the nomination of Ali Shaddad al-Fares, a leader in the movement, to replace him.
The movement’s goal was to tighten its grip on the local authority in both the legislative and executive branches, especially in light of the vacancy of the council’s presidency following a court judgement against its president, Sabah Al-Bazouni. Al-Bazouni was sentenced to prison for a corruption case, and Walid Hamid Kaitan took over as acting president of the council.
However, the Wisdom Movement’s efforts to dismiss Al-Aidani were met with the rejection of a number of council members. They pushed for a vote to remove Al-Bazouni from the presidency of the council and appoint a replacement to end Kaitan’s mandate and prevent the movement from taking full control of the provincial institutions.
Despite the failure of the impeachment attempts, the conflict did not stop.
It later developed into demonstrations organised by supporters of the Wisdom Movement demanding the removal of Al-Aidani. On 9 December 2018, Kaitan, in his capacity as acting president of the council, announced the opening of a four-day nomination period for the position of governor of Basra.
Nominations open for Basra governor in 2018
Al-Aidani responded with a press release from his media office: “The acting head of the provincial council, Walid Hamid Kaitan, has committed a legal offence when he opened the door for candidacy for the position of governor, because I am still governor and have not taken the constitutional oath as a deputy.”
He added that “the procedure was without the knowledge of the majority of the council members,” noting that “the Wisdom Movement bloc pressured the acting chairman of the council for the governor’s position.”
On 13 December 2018, a number of members of the Basra Provincial Council announced the establishment of a new bloc within the council under the name “Basra’s Fathers”, which included 18 members, with the aim of “reforming the situation in the province”, as declared in the statement of establishment.
The next day, the council called for an extraordinary session to choose a replacement for Al-Aidani. The session failed due to the absence of members of the Basra Fathers bloc, and the attempt stalled again.
Things quickly calmed down after the announcement that the head of the provincial council, Sabah al-Bazouni, was included in the General Amnesty Law No. 27 of 2016 and released after nearly 18 months of imprisonment.
Al-Bazouni resumed his duties as head of the council, despite the judicial committee’s previous rejection of his request for amnesty.
It was widely reported in political circles that State of Law Coalition leader, Nouri al-Maliki, was behind the decision to include Al-Bazouni in the amnesty, a move that was a response to the Wisdom Movement’s attempts to dominate Basra’s local government and control its resources and wealth.
Everything was in favour of Al-Aidani
By 2019, the tides turned in favour of Asaad Al-Aidani. He was granted the right to directly invite companies for contracting the implementation of various projects, with the exception of government contracts, by a decision of the Council of Ministers.
The head of the follow-up cell in the Prime Minister’s Office at the time, current MP Mustafa Jabbar Sanad, played a major role in the issuance of this decision. Eventually, a broader decision was later issued to grant this right to all governors, ministers, heads of bodies and entities not linked to a ministry.
The Ministry of Planning approved a plan of major projects for Basra province, which included various sectors, followed by the Ministry of Finance releasing the necessary funding for their implementation.
With the flow of funds and the start of projects, Basra witnessed a kind of urban and service renaissance in its various areas. This was accompanied by a large-scale media campaign that praised Al-Aidani’s achievements and raised his popularity at the local and national levels, despite accusations of administrative and financial corruption.
These achievements strengthened his public image. He was referred to as an example of a successful executive, which prompted a number of political and media figures to nominate him to form the government after the resignation of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi on 30 November 2019, in the wake of the October protests.
Despite being nominated by the Al-Binaa parliamentary bloc, Al-Aidani was not tasked with forming the government. This eventually went to Mustafa Al-Kadhimi.
After that, Al-Aidani founded a political party that joined the “Determination Alliance” and ran in the 2021 parliamentary elections, winning five seats from Basra governorate.
However, Al-Aidani resigned from the parliament before he was sworn in, paving the way for the rise of the alternative candidate, Alaa al-Haidari.
This time, he could not repeat what he did in the 2018 elections, when he retained the governor’s position without formally relinquishing his parliamentary seat, due to legal amendments that prevented him from doing so.
With his resignation, the Taaseem Coalition’s tally dropped to four seats.
Following the withdrawal of the Sadrist Movement’s 73 MPs from parliament, the coalition’s tally rose to seven, with three of its candidates winning replacement seats.
Later, MP Ali Al-Mashkour split from the coalition and joined the State of Law Coalition. MP Sara Al-Salehi split and joined the Sadrist bloc, leaving the number of Taaseem Coalition seats at five to this day.
In the 2023 provincial council elections, the Taaseem Coalition competed strongly, winning 12 out of 23 seats in the Basra Provincial Council, giving it a comfortable majority.
After Al- Aidani was re-elected as governor of Basra, he consolidated his position as the head of the executive authority in the province, appearing more entrenched than ever.
Al-Aidani is confidently on the path to leadership.
If he decides to run in the next parliamentary elections – scheduled for next November – with candidates from all provinces, not just Basra, he could become a national-level political player, with a popular base that extends far beyond the south.