ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Officials inside the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) say that their secretary general, Jalal Talabani, has made a good recovery from the stroke he suffered a year ago and will be returning from Germany to the Kurdistan Region on New Year’s eve.
Zuber Osman, head of the PUK central committee, told his party website that he has the latest information about Talabani: The PUK leader “speaks fluently” and “we hope he will be home soon and celebrate the New Year together,” he announced.
Osman’s comments came a couple of days after the PUK’s main TV channel Kurdsat showed photos of Talabani in which he is holding the latest issue of the party’s mouthpiece newspaper, Kurdistani Nwe.
Talabani, 80, suffered a stroke in December last year in Baghdad and was flown to a hospital in Germany where he has been recuperating since.
“Releasing these photos dashed the dreams of those who couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Talabani,” Osman said, referring to local political rivals of Talabani’s PUK.
Osman also said that Talabani, who is also Iraq’s president, is even expected to attend the party’s fourth congress due to be held at the end of January next year.
This is the second time the PUK media releases photos of Talabani since his hospitalization last year.
Other political groups in Kurdistan, including the rival Change Movement (Gorran) which beat the PUK in the September legislative elections, expressed happiness at Talabani’s new photos and apparent good health.
“We will be happy if returns to us in a better health, that is what we want,” Omar Sayid Ali, Gorran’s top negotiator in Erbil, said. “But it can’t be that they keep releasing a different photo each time. They should treat the matter with more transparency.”
An official source inside the Kurdistan Democratic Party told Rudaw that KDP leaders were glad to see Talabani’s latest photos and hear that his condition had improved.
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