The United Nations General Assembly selected Barham Salih, a former president of Iraq and veteran Kurdish politician, as the leader of its refugee agency on Thursday.
Mr. Salih, 65, will begin a five-year term as the chief of one of the major U.N. agencies, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, in January. The assembly broke into applause when his confirmation was announced.
António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, who led the refugee agency before taking the helm of the whole body, nominated Mr. Salih for the role. Mr. Salih will be the first Middle Easterner and first former refugee to lead the agency.
He emerged as the top choice for the role from a field of about a dozen other contenders that included the departing head of the Swedish furniture company IKEA and former foreign ministers of Spain and Finland.
Mr. Salih said he was honored. “I myself was once a refugee, and I know well how protection and assistance can change the course of a life,” he said in a statement posted on social media. “This experience will inform my program of leadership, grounded in solidarity, pragmatism, and commitment to international law.”
Mr. Salih is regarded as one of Iraq’s most prominent former politicians. He served as Iraq’s president from 2018 to 2022 and before that twice as the prime minister of the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. He has also held other leadership roles.
An engineer by training, with a doctoral degree in statistics and computer applications, Mr. Salih entered politics by way of activism in the Kurdish national movement in the 1970s, when he was still in high school. He was arrested twice, and tortured, under the rule of the former dictator Saddam Hussein. He left Iraq for the United Kingdom after high school to flee further persecution and pursue his education.
Fareed Yasseen, a former Iraqi diplomat and ambassador to Washington, said in an interview that Mr. Salih could “relate to the plight of refugees, being all too familiar with the suffering of Iraqis during Saddam’s regime.”
Mr. Salih’s experience as a leading member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political parties in Kurdistan, and his role in the rebuilding of Iraq after the 2003 U.S. military invasion toppled Mr. Hussein, placed him in a position of building alliances and negotiating with both foreign powers and domestic political factions. Those are the qualities that Mr. Guterres said made him ideal for his new role.
“Mr. Salih brings senior diplomatic, political and administrative leadership experience, including engagement with international and regional institutions, with human rights and humanitarian vision and experience, including as refugee, crisis negotiator and architect of national reforms,” Mr. Guterres said in a statement.
He succeeds Filippo Grandi of Italy, who has been leading the refugee agency for a decade, through a tumultuous period of budget cuts and shifting attitudes toward refugees in Western countries.
In his final planned news conference as high commissioner in Geneva on Wednesday, Mr. Grandi said that it was painful to leave the organization at a time of crisis, and that presenting “a convincing narrative on refugees” in this geopolitical climate had been among his biggest challenges.
The U.N. refugee agency operates in 128 countries, serving millions of people fleeing persecution or displaced by conflict, climate change or economic crises. The agency estimates that there are currently about 117 million people forcibly displaced around the world.
And like all U.N. agencies, the refugee agency is facing budgetary challenges. Its funding has slumped from $5.5 billion in 2024 to an expected $3.9 billion this year, and is expected to drop further in 2026, even as needs grow. The United States, the top donor to the organization, provided $2.1 billion in 2024, close to 40 percent of the agency’s $5.5 billion operating budget, but hat funding dropped to $811 million this year.
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.
The post For the First Time, a Former Refugee Will Lead the U.N.’s Refugee Agency appeared first on New York Times.
