Wafiq Al-Samarrai

Wafiq Al-Samarrai (born 1 July 1947) is an Iraqi general born in the region of Samarra.

He defected in 1994 and drove up to Kirkuk, then walked for 30 hours to cross the frontier into the Northern Kurdish enclave. At first he allied himself with Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. They fomented a mini war in early 1995 between Kurdish groups and the Iraqi Army that went wrong when the insurgents failed to secure American military support.

Al-Samarrai moved to Syria and eventually made his way to London, where he headed a group called the Higher Council for National Salvation. In 2003 he returned to his hometown Samarra, Iraq and remained there until he was appointed as security advisor to President Jalal Talabani in 2005 and moved to the green zone in Baghdad.

On March 6th 2008, the iraqi presidency website publicised a judicial decision to lift off all restrictions imposed on Gn.Wafiq Al-Samarrai among which to end freeze of his movable and immovable money for having no moral or material evidence that prove the implication of Al-Samarrai in the 1991 genocide incident that he was wrongly accused of. The decision was issued by investigation judges chief in the Supreme Criminal Court Judge Adnan Al Badri.

References

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/13/wirq213.xmlhttp://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-14960-Iraq-caught-in-new-row-over-execution-order.htmlhttp://www.iraqipresidency.net/news_detial.php?language=arabic&id=5337&type=news