Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani has served as deputy prime minister for energy since 2010, and is also in charge of the Ministry of Electricity. He was Iraqi minister of oil from 2006 to 2010.

 

Previously, Deputy Prime Minister al-Shahristani served as a member of the Iraqi Parliament (2006), and as first deputy chairman of the Iraqi National Assembly (2005). In 2004 he taught as a professor at Baghdad University, and from 2002 to 2004 was concurrently a visiting professor at Surrey University in the United Kingdom. In 2003 he was head of the Iraqi National Academy of Sciences, and prior to his role there, from 1998 to 2002 was an advisor to the International Technical Research Centre, London.

 

Deputy Prime Minister al-Shahristani spent more than a decade (1979-91) as a political prisoner in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison under the regime of Saddam Hussein. First arrested for his opposition to the government’s persecution of Iraq’s Shi’a population, and kept captive after his refusal to help the regime build an atomic weapon. He escaped during an allied bombing raid on Baghdad during the First Gulf War. Deputy Prime Minister al-Shahristani fled to Iran where he served as head of the Gulf War Victims Organization from 1991 to 1995. He later continued his support for the victims of Hussein’s regime and the Gulf War as head of the Iraqi Political Prisoners Union (2003) and as chief of the Iraqi Refugees Relief Committee (1998-2003).

 

Before his arrest and imprisonment, Deputy Prime Minister al-Shahristani served as chief scientific advisor to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. Prior to that, he was a lecturer at Mosul University (1973), an assistant professor at Baghdad University (1974), chief of Baghdad University’s Radioisotope Production Department from 1975 to 1977, and chief of the Nuclear Chemistry Department from 1977 to 1979.