The Iraqi National Assembly (parliament) chose on Wednesday, April 6, 2005, Jalal al-Talabani, a veteran Kurdish leader, as the country's new president for the transitional period.

Talabani, a former rebel leader fighting with Saddam Hussein's regime, is the first Kurd to be crowned the country's president, although it was a largely ceremonial position.

"I promise I will spare no effort in achieving the goals of the Iraqi people... and carrying out the Iraqi duties without sectarian or racial differences," said Talabani, shortly after he was elected.

A liberal politician, Talabani has spent his life struggling for the rights of Iraqi Kurds, long oppressed by the previous Saddam dictatorship.

Born in 1933, he began his lifetime of activism as a teenager. He began studying law but had to go into hiding in 1956 to escape arrest for his political activities as founder and secretary general of the Kurdistan Student Union.

He eventually returned to law school, and began work as an editor of two Kurdish publications. After graduating in 1959, he was called to military duty in the Iraqi army, serving as commander of a tank unit.

When the Kurdish north took up arms against the former Saddam Hussein regime in 1961, he led the Kurdish fight both at home in Iraq and diplomatic missions to Europe and the Middle East to seek support for the Kurdish population.

With the collapse of the Kurdish revolt in 1975, he founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two key Kurdish parties in Iraq.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurdish region enjoyed autonomy from the government under president Saddam while it was protected by US planes that enforced a no-fly zones.

But Talabani and Kurdish Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani began fighting over control of the north.

The Kurds, accounting for no more than 20 percent of the national population, achieved a milestone victory in January, when Talabani and his regional rival Massud Barzani fielded a joint list that won more than a quarter of the parliamentary seats.

During his tenure, Talabani faces tough tasks such as regaining security and rebuilding the economy.

"We will be working on regaining security and stability as well as getting rid of terrorism," he said.

He also warned Iraq's neighboring countries to stop interfering with Iraqi interior affairs and stop backing the insurgency by providing information and weapons.

"We will be a friend to whoever wants to be a friend, and enemy to whoever wants to be an enemy, he said.

Iraq's 275-member National Assembly on Wednesday elected Adel Abdul Mahdi, the interim finance minister, and Ghazi al-Yawar, the interim president, as first and second vice presidents for a transitional period till the year end.

The two, along with new president Jalal Talabani, are considered to have equal authority, a largely ceremonial one compared with that of the prime minister.

The list of the three, called the Presidential Council, won about 90 percent of the vote at Wednesday's parliamentary session.

Under Iraq's interim constitution, the presidential council will have two weeks to designate a prime minister and a cabinet, which will be put to a vote of confidence in the legislature.

Abdul Mahdi is one of main leaders of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the biggest Islamic party in Iraq's Shiite Muslims.

After Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled by the US-led forces in 2003, Abdul Mahdi became deputy to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who succeeded his deceased brother as head of the party in August 2003.

Mahdi represented Hakim in the US-handpicked Governing Council and was appointed finance minister after Iyad Allawi's interim government assumed power from the US occupation authority in mid-2004.

During his 50 years in politics, Mahdi first turned from a member of Saddam's Baath Party to a Marxist, and then to a pro-Iran Islamist before he became a US-favored politician during the occupation of Iraq.

He settled in France for some time, where he obtained a master degree in political and economic sciences.

The 61-year-old politician represents a strong secular force inside the Islamic bloc and is expected to be an opponent to the Shiites who preach a regime similar to the one in Iran.

His appointment as the first vice president came after heated horse-trading was made among liberal politicians from the Shiite parties and the Kurdish alliance to enhance secularism rather than the religious trend favored by Islamists who had won a considerable share in the elections.

Ghazi al-Yawar, 47, is one of the most prominent Sheikhs of the well-known Arabian tribe of Shimmer, which has both Sunni and Shiite Arab members in Iraq and several neighboring countries.

He was named to become the second vice president to represent the Sunni Arabs, a 20 percent minority that used to enjoy privilege under Saddam's rule but have largely shunned the Jan. 30 elections.

His nomination was accepted following rounds of negotiations between the winning parties, which preferred to bring the marginalized Sunni community into the political process.

At a closed-door meeting of the dissolved interim governing council in May, 2004, Yawar was picked as the country's first president.

He enjoys widespread support from many national, religious, sectarian and political parties in Iraq.

Born in 1958 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, he studied engineering in the United States and lived for 15 years in Saudi Arabia, where he ran several companies.

Always wearing traditional tribal robes, Yawar was an active president during his tenure, and he was sometimes critical of US security policies in Iraq.

He was invited to attend the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in the United States in 2004, while paying visits to a number of European countries and representing Iraq at Arab summits in Tunisia and Algeria.

He married last year Nisreen Berwari, a Kurdish politician who is the minister of Public Works in the interim government.