Rafi al-Issawi
Rafi Hiyad al-Issawi (born 2 March 1966) is an Iraqi politician who is a former finance minister and deputy prime minister. A doctor by profession, he is the fourth most senior politician from the Sunni Arab minority after former Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak and Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Usama al-Nujayfi.
Rafi Hiyad al-Issawi
Ali Yousif Al-Shukri (acting)
Early life and education[edit]
Issawi was born in Anbar in 1966.[3][4] He comes from the Albu Issa tribe.[3] This tribe is the dominant tribe in an area of around 80 square kilometers south of the city of Fallujah, in the western province of Al-Anbar.[5]
He trained as an orthopedic surgeon in Baghdad and Basra, before becoming the head of the Fallujah hospital. He was in that role during the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004 and he reported that 800 local Iraqis had died as a result of the attack.[6] He accused the United States Army of blocking a team of eleven Iraqi ministry of health ambulances with 20 doctors from evacuating the dead and injured or helping the injured.[7] A few months earlier he had accused the US Army of "constantly attacking ambulances", saying that an ambulance driver had been killed in a September 2004 bombing aimed at the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.[8]