AHMED CHALABI

Dr. Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (born 1945) is part of a three-man leadership council for the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was created for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and which has received major funding and assistance from the United States. Chalabi is a highly controversial figure with his supporters, many of whom are neoconservatives within The Pentagon viewing him as the hope for democracy in Iraq, and his opponents, which include some in the United States government, seeing him as a charlatan of questionable background, who is out of touch with Iraq and who has no real power base there.

Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has mostly lived in the U.S. and United Kingdom since that time. He was involved in organizing a resistance movement among Kurds in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s.

In 1977 he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan; after the bank's failure Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for bank fraud by a Jordanian court.[1] Chalbi maintains that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him.