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BAGHDAD, Apr 7 (Reuters): Iraq's newly elected president was to be sworn into office Thursday and was then expected to name a new prime minister as lawmakers pushed ahead with the stilted process of forming a government.
Former Kurdish guerrilla leader Jalal Talabani, 71, was to be formally made president at a ceremony in Baghdad's tightly protected Green Zone, becoming the first non-Arab president of an Arab state in a landmark move for the Kurdish minority.
His vice-presidents, Shi'ite politician Adel Abdul Mahdi and Sunni tribesman Ghazi Yawar, were also to be sworn in, forming the presidential council, the next step in the process of drawing up a government nearly 10 weeks after elections.
After the inauguration, Talabani was expected to announce that Islamist Shi'ite leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who opposed Saddam Hussein for decades in exile, would be Iraq's first democratically elected prime minister in 50 years.
Jaafari, a softly spoken doctor who spent years in Iran and London, would then have up to two weeks to name a cabinet, although the announcement was expected sooner than that.
From his jail cell outside Baghdad, Saddam watched Talabani's election on video Wednesday and might also end up watching Thursday's formal swearing in and the naming of Jaafari, Iraq's human rights minister said.
Seeing the election of a Kurd and former foe as president had left Saddam shaken, minister Bakhtiar Amin said.
"He was clearly upset. He realised that it was over, that a democratic process had taken place and that there was a new, elected president," Amin told Reuters.
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