Jalal Talabani, former Iraqi President and a veteran leader of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination, was laid to rest on Friday in his home city of Sulaimaniya in nothern Iraq <br /><br />Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to the 83-year-old who died on Tuesday in Germany.<br /><br />The Kurdish flag draped his coffin, flown in on a plane given special exemption from a ban on international flights to the Kurdish region imposed by Iraq’s government, in retaliation for a Kurdish referendum on independence.<br /><br />“Since the start of the Kurdish liberation movement, he brought us to this point. He always looked after us,” said local resident Karim Mohammed.<br /><br />“He chose Kurdistan, and chose the struggle of the people of Kurdistan over a normal life,” Qubad Talabani https://t.co/NPeJzAK8YR— Rudaw English (@RudawEnglish) 6 octobre 2017<br /><br />In 2005, two years after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Talabani became Iraq’s first non-Arab president.<br /><br />He stepped down in 2014, following a stroke.<br /><br />His successor, Fuad Musam, also a Kurd, presided over the ceremony at the airport on Friday.<br /><br />Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is demanding that the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government cancels the outcome of last week’s independence vote, did not come to the funeral. Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji represented the central government.<br /><br />Talabani had been too ill to express his views on the independence referendum but his party gave it only lukewarm support.<br /><br />At the airport ceremony, Kurdish regional government leader Masoud Barzani, Talabani’s rival for decades in the movement for self-rule, sat between President Masum and Talabani’s widow Hero.<br /><br />Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, the highest-ranking foreign official in attendance, repeated Tehran’s assertion that the independence vote was a “strategic mistake”, Iranian media said.<br /><br />Talabani had been too ill to express his views about the independence referendum. His Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party, however, gave it only lukewarm support.<br /><br />with Reuters<br />
