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Deaths on September 25

2003Sep, 25

Aqila al-Hashimi

Aqila al-Hashimi, Iraqi translator and politician (b. 1953)
Aqila al-Hashimi (Arabic عقيلة الهاشمي cAqīla al-Hāshimī; 1953 - September 25, 2005) was an Iraqi politician who served on the Iraqi Governing Council.

Aqila al-Hashimi was born in 1953 into a prominent Shi'ite religious family in Najaf. She gained a degree in law in Iraq and a doctorate in French Literature at the Sorbonne.

She joined the Foreign Ministry in 1979 working as a French translator for Tariq Aziz. Al-Hashimi ran the Oil-for-Food Programme in the Foreign Ministry under Saddam Hussein.

She was one of only three women on the IGC and the only member of the former regime to have been on the council. She had been expected to become Iraq's new Ambassador to the United NationsShe died of abdomen wounds suffered five days earlier when her convoy was ambushed by six men in a pickup truck near her home in western Baghdad. The killing was blamed on supporters of the former president, Saddam Hussein.

The British politician George Galloway, who was strongly opposed to the war and who referred to attacks on coalition forces as a “bloody good hiding,” discussed her participation in the Governing Council in an interview shortly after her death, saying that although he derived no pleasure from her death, he denounced her role in the Iraqi Governing Council, calling her a "puppet minister."

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Events on 2003

  • 17Mar

    2003 invasion of Iraq

    Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Robin Cook, resigns from the British Cabinet in disagreement with government plans for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
  • 7Apr

    Saddam Hussein

    U.S. troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later.
  • 27Aug

    North Korea and weapons of mass destruction

    The first six-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, convene to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
  • 12Sep

    Pan Am Flight 103

    The United Nations lifts sanctions against Libya after that country agreed to accept responsibility and recompense the families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
  • 12Nov

    2003 invasion of Iraq

    Iraq War: In Nasiriyah, Iraq, at least 23 people, among them the first Italian casualties of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are killed in a suicide bomb attack on an Italian police base.