Jaafar al-Sadr

Al-Sadr is the only son and one of six children of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shia cleric who was imprisoned, tortured and then executed by the government of Saddam Hussein in 1980, after he published a defense of the Iranian Revolution.[2] Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr is said to have been the ideological father of the Islamic Dawa Party.

Jaafar al-Sadr is the brother-in-law of Muqtada al-Sadr, who married his sister.[3] He also has family ties to Mohammad Khatami, the former reformists President of Iran.[4]

After the death of his father when he was eight, he moved to al-Kadhimiya in Baghdad where he went to school and studied law at Baghdad University.[1] He then moved to Najaf, where he studied under his relative Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr.[4] He moved to Qom, in Iran, in 1998 where he studied under Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri;[5] In 1998 he was arrested and his office closed down.[6] He was put under house arrest and jailed for six months (sources differ on this).[4] He moved to Beirut in 2006 where he obtained a degree in Sociology and Anthropology.[7][8] He has a son and three daughters.[1]

He returned to Iraq after the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein - sources differ as to whether this was in 2003 or 2009.[4][1] Jaafar al-Sadr was elected in 2010 as a member of the Council of Representatives within Baghdad Province for the State of Law Coalition of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He said he refused to join the Islamic Dawa Party founded by his father because he disagreed with the Islamist ideology but liked Maliki's platform of non-sectarianism and the rule of law. He said that years of studying Islam had convinced him that religion and politics don't mix and that he disagreed with his brother-in-law Muqtader al-Sadr on the use of violence to achieve political goals.[7] He declared that he doesn't believe in a religious or a secular state, but in a "civil state, which is the formula closest to the British and German model of dealing between state and beliefs".[1] He said the invasion of Iraq was wrong even though Iraq was suffering from "an abhorrent dictatorship"; Iraqi people "needed help and understanding from the freedom-loving and anti-injustice peoples in the world and did not need an invasion and occupation".[1]

He received 28,779 personal votes in the election, the second largest number of votes on this list after the Prime Minister.[9][5] Following the election, he was touted as a potential prime minister. Whilst negotiations were on-going on the formation of a new government, the Sadrists conducted a "referendum" among Sadrist supporters on who should become the Prime Minister; Jaafar came second, receiving support from 23% of the 1.2 million people who voted.[10][11][12]

He resigned from parliament in February 2011, to protest at the deterioration in services and the system of "patronage and cronyism".[13][8]

Al-Sadr was again cited as a potential Prime Minister following the 2018 election, where the list headed by his brother-in-law, Muqtada al-Sadr, was the surprise winner with 54 seats.[14] Veteran Shiite Arab politician Adil Abdul-Mahdi was eventually elected Prime Minister. He was appointed the Iraqi ambassador to the United Kingdom in 2019.[15]

Following the 2021 election, he was again nominated to the Prime Ministership by the "Save the Homeland Alliance", which brought together three of the four largest parties - the Sadrist Movement, the Kurdistan Democratic Party the Sunni Arab majority Progress Party.[16]