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Former Iraqi president Barham Salih has been appointed the next United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a UN source confirmed to AFP on Friday.
He will take over at a time when the agency is grappling with severe funding shortages.
Salih, who served as Iraq’s president between 2018 and 2022, will assume the role next month, succeeding Filippo Grandi.
Grandi is stepping down at the end of December after a decade leading the UNHCR.
The Geneva-based agency has faced substantial international funding cuts and has been forced to scale back significantly, shedding almost 5,000 staff this year—more than a quarter of its workforce.
A prominent figure in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Iraq’s second-largest Kurdish party, Salih is regarded as a seasoned moderate with decades of political experience.
Since the 2003 US-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein, he has held several senior posts within both the Iraqi federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
His past roles include serving in the US-backed interim authority established after the invasion, acting as one of Iraq’s deputy prime ministers from 2006 to 2009, and becoming the prime minister of the Kurdistan region from 2009 to 2012.
Educated in the UK, Salih speaks English, Arabic and Kurdish. His four-year presidency was largely ceremonial, in keeping with the post being traditionally assigned to a Kurd since 2005.
He is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative and the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
According to the Belfer Centre, Salih holds a civil engineering degree from Cardiff University and a PhD in statistics and computer applications in engineering from the University of Liverpool.
Originally from Sulaimaniyah, the second-largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan, he has championed several major local projects, including the creation of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, now considered one of the country’s leading academic institutions.
