BAGHDAD, July 30: Iraq’s interim Governing Council named on Wednesday Ibrahim Jafari of Shia Dawa party as the US-approved body’s first president, a Kurdish official announced.

Mr Jafari, the Dawa spokesman, was chosen to be the trail-blazing council’s president based on his name being the first alphabetically among the nine council members who will share the rotating presidency, Mr Barham Saleh of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) told AFP.

“There was a consensus on the alphabetical order. It was the best solution,” said Mr Saleh of the presidency which will change monthly.

Mr Jafari will be followed as president by two fellow Shias, who forms a 60 per cent majority in Iraq: the Pentagon-backed Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist and longtime member of the exiled opposition.

The line-up of rotating presidents includes five Shias, two Sunnis, and two Kurdish members of the 25-strong council, reflecting Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversity.

Mr Saleh said US overseer Paul Bremer and the top British official in Iraq, John Sawers, attended the session of the council, which was unveiled on July 13 after consultations between the US-led coalition and Iraqi political parties.

The council, which is tasked with skippering Iraq until democratic elections no earlier than 2004, had to avoid aggravating the country’s ethnic and religious fault lines in making the delicate decision.

Mr Jafari, a doctor by profession, joined the Dawa movement in 1966. The group, the oldest Islamic movement in Iraq, was founded in 1957-8 and is based on the ideology of reforming Islamic thought and modernising religious institutions.

The party was banned in 1980 under toppled president Saddam Hussein when Mr Jafari fled the country.

The other Shias who will hold the presidency are: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, number two in the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Mohammed Bahr al-Uloom, a liberal cleric.

The Sunnis are former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi and Mohsen Abdul Hamid, secretary-general of the Islamic Party, while the Kurds are Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) chief Massoud Barzani and PUK leader Jalal Talabani.—AFP