Misha'an al-Juburi

Iraqi politician

Misha'an al Juburi (مشعان الجبوري; born 1 August 1955) is an Iraqi politician from the Sunni Arab community and member of Al Arabiya Coalition. He also was the head of Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc, which held three seats in the Iraqi Council of Representatives from 2005 to 2010. Juburi is the publisher of the al Itijah al Akhar newspaper and the owner of the Syrian based Arrai TV. He is a leader of the Al Jiburi|Jiburi clan, which is powerful in Salah ad Din Governorate. As of 2016, he is a senior member of a parliamentary committee investigating official corruption.

Al Juburi was born in 1955 in the town of Al Shirqat, located between Tikrit and Mosul. In the late 1980s, his young son died, and he went on television to criticise the hospital as incompetent, which resulted in him being jailed. After he was released he moved away from politics towards business, exporting wool from Salah Al Din province to Britain. He founded the Iraqi Homeland Party in Syria and published a newspaper called the "Other Direction". He is a relative of the Iraqi Ambassador to Tunisia, Hamid al Jabouri, who defected and sought political asylum in Britain in 1993. He was a member of the Follow Up and Arrangement Committee grouping of Iraqi exiles.

During the U. S. led invasion of Iraq, Juburi took control of the city of Mosul with the aid of Kurdish Peshmerga, and took over a former palace owned by Ali Hassan al Majid. Following his self appointment, a popular uprising brought locals to the street. Locals were angry at Juburi over a mixture of old allegations that he had stolen money from Saddam and newer allegations that he was involved in looting in Mosul following the takeover. His party, the Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc stood in the Iraqi legislative election of January 2005 where it won one seat. In the subsequent December elections, it increased its representation three seats. Juburi said they supported the Iraqi insurgency, although opposed suicide bombings, and called for the Multinational Force in Iraq to be replaced by United Nations led peacekeepers. In 2005, al Juburi was backed by the Sunni Arab dialogue council as their candidate for speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly, but he was vetoed by the United Iraqi Alliance due to his links with Uday Hussein. Juburi was among the minority of Sunni Arabs who supported the Constitution of Iraq in the referendum. Juburi was indicted in December 2005 with the theft of millions of dollars of government money intended to protect oil pipelines near Kirkuk against attack. The money had been given to him in 2004. He was accused by Iraqi officials of diverting the money towards the Iraqi insurgency, although this hasn't been proved. Following the indictment, he fled to Syria. In exile he founded Al Zawraa TV, a twenty four hour satellite channel broadcast by the Arabsat satellite to an area that included the Middle East and North Africa. The station's transmissions on the Egyptian owned Nilesat satellite network ceased in February 2007. Al Zawraa has broadcast songs eulogising Iraqi victims of "the American occupiers", has described the Iraqi insurgency as "freedom fighters" and the Shi'ite leader Muqtada al Sadr as a "gangster"

In an interview following the execution of the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he described Hussein as a brave martyr, and said the ones who killed him were like those who killed the second Caliph of Islam, Umar. On January 9, 2008, al Juburi was sanctioned by the U. S. Department of the Treasury under Executive Order 13438 "for providing financial, material, and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq," placing him on Office of Foreign Assets Control's SDN List. In 2009, he offered on TV to buy weapons to give to the resistance to fight the U. S. led Multi National Force – Iraq. He said he wanted to obtain medium range missiles so they could attack and leave before the forces traced the site. In 2010, he criticized Gulf governments and TV companies for broadcasting anti Shi'ite statements from an Egyptian cleric, Muhammed al Zoghbi. Zoghbi had called for Shi'ites to be purged from Muslim countries and called on Allah to inflict them with cancer and freeze the blood in their veins. Juburi called the cleric a liar and a lunatic and called for him to be banned from TV. During the 2011 Libyan civil war, he went on TV to say he supported Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, saying protests should focus on pro American governments. His channel Arrai TV has been used by overseas Libyans to defend the Gaddafi regime and denounce the replacement government and to keep morale up of those who have fled Libya since the revolution. The channel has aired a number of audio messages from Gaddafi and his aides since they fled Tripoli. Juburi has justified his support for Gaddafi, and Gaddafi loyalists, by arguing that the fight in Libya is now between native Libyan's and foreign invaders.