Topic: Adnan al-Dulaimi

Adnan al-Dulaimi is a Sunni Iraqi politician who became prominent following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. He and his supporters have largely focused on two issues: ending what they term the US "occupation" of Iraq; and strengthening and protecting the position of the country's Sunni-Arab minority at a time when the country's majority Shiite-Arabs have been in the political ascendancy.

At the time of the invasion, he was an Islamic studies professor at Baghdad University, but soon after the fall of Hussein he became head of the Sunni Endowment, or Waqf, a quasi-government agency charged with overseeing Sunni mosques and the distribution of some of their donations. The government removed him from that post in August 2005, drawing protests from a number of Sunni groups, among them the Association of Moslem Scholars, a federation of Sunni clerics that favors a Sunni-inflected version of Islamic law for Iraq.

He is a leader of the General Council for the People of Iraq, a component of the Iraqi Accord Front (IAF) which won 44 seats in the December 2005 general election. He has been a leading Sunni Arab politician since the fall of Saddam Hussein and has often been at odds with the country's Shiite-led government, complaining that "our participation in this so-called national unity government is weak and marginalized and our ministers have no authority to serve Iraq or its people."