Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani is suffering from extreme exhaustion and dehydration but is in high spirits and his life is not in danger, his office said Monday.
Talabani, Iraq’s 74-year-old Kurdish leader, was flown from his home town in northern Iraq to the Jordanian capital Amman on Sunday after falling ill, and underwent tests at the King Hussein Medical Centre.
”The first results showed that his condition is stable and there’s no reason to worry,” said a statement from his office in Baghdad. ”The president’s vital organs are all in good condition.
”The tests showed that his excellency was suffering from extreme exhaustion that caused him to lose a lot of fluid: fatigue and dehydration,” it said.
”His excellency will undergo more medical tests to know for sure the details of his health, but his companions said President Talabani is in high spirits and fully aware and interacting normally with others.”
Earlier, an official in Talabani’s party had suggested he was suffering from kidney problems, but there was no reference to this in the statement, and the president’s US-based son denied reports of serious problems.
”I spoke with him this morning. He was in good spirits. He’s suffering from exhaustion,” Qubad Talabani told the US news network CNN. ”The reports about him having a heart attack or a stroke are completely false.”
The Iraqi president’s son said his father got on and off his plane on his own, was ”up and about” and was able to communicate and eat food.
A senior US administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Agence France-Presse that the US government had provided a C-130 military transport plane equipped with medical facilities to take Talabani from Iraq to Amman.
Talabani is the first non-Arab to lead a modern independent Arab majority state. He became head of state in April 2005 after the first election in Iraq since a US-led invasion overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Talabani has since won praise for attempting the near impossible task of brokering a consensus between post-invasion Iraq’s bitterly divided Sunni and Shi’ite, Arab and Kurdish factions.
His most recent public engagement was on Saturday, when he held a news conference in Sulaimaniyah after meeting Kurdistan’s regional president, Massoud Barzani, and the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.
In recent days, Talabani has been forced to intervene in several national disputes that threatened to further divide Iraq’s warring factions. – AFP
