ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s outgoing Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi appointed a Turkmen woman as the acting finance minister on Satuday after accepting the resignation of predecessor Ihsan Abdul Jabbar.
“Kadhimi assigned Minister of State Hayam Ni’mat as the acting Ministry of Finance,” state media said, adding that this decision is effective “until the formation of the new government.”
Alongside Ni’mat’s appointment, Kadhimi agreed to relieve the previous acting finance minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar of his position, after the Iraqi parliament on Tuesday voted to remove him from the position.
Jabbar is also Iraq’s current minister of oil.
The Iraqi parliament on Thursday took a major step to end the political deadlock in the country by electing 78-year-old Kurdish politician and former Iraqi water resources minister Abdul Latif Rashid as president, defeating incumbent Barham Salih.
Rashid immediately tasked Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, a candidate from the pro-Iran Coordination Framework, with the Iraqi prime minister position and placed him in charge of forming the country’s next government by naming all the ministers in his cabinet.
Iraqis headed to the election polls last October, the aim of holding early elections was to form a government that would fulfill the demands of thousands of protestors who took to the street of Baghdad and several southern provinces in massive protests in 2019, forcing then prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to resign.
Over a year after elections were held, the government formation process has finally been expedited by the election of a president, after many months of political impasse and intra-Shiite turmoil.
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