Mithal Jamal Hussein Ahmad al-Alusi (; born 23 May 1953) is an Iraqi politician and the leader of the Iraqi Ummah Party. He was elected to the Iraqi Council of Representatives as an independent in the December 2005 election and was once again elected in the 2014 Iraqi parliamentary election as part of the Civil Democratic Alliance which is an Iraqi political coalition formed by various liberal and civil figures and his party one seat, represented by himself. He arrived fifth place in Baghdad out of seventy-one seats. He is a Sunni Muslim Arab politician and supports a close alliance with the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel. Early life Alusi was born on the 23 May 1953 in Alus, a small village near Haditha, in Al Anbar Governorate. Al-Alusi hails from a very prominent Iraqi Sunni family from Anbar, and his father was a renowned scholar and Baghdad University professor of Classical Arabic literature. Life in exile In 1976, he was sentenced to death in absentia while studying in Cairo for trying to undermine Saddam Hussein. Alusi was then a member of the Ba'ath Party, but had been aligned with opponents of Hussein within the party such as Abdel-Khaliq Al-Samara'i, who was himself killed by the security services. Alusi went into exile in Germany and worked as a businessman. In December 2002, he was involved in the takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Berlin to protest Hussein's tyranny, and was convicted of hostage taking by a German court and sentenced to three years in jail. His sentence was later reduced to house arrest. He returned to Iraq in October 2003 and joined the Iraqi National Congress. Return to Iraq After the invasion of Iraq, Alusi was appointed the General Director of Culture and Media at the Supreme National De-Baathification Commission. In September 2004, after making a public visit to Israel, al-Alusi was expelled from the Iraqi National Congress and sacked from his job at the De-Baathification Commission. He was indicted by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq for "having contacts with enemy states", a crime under a 1969 Baathist law. He was subsequently released after the Iraq's Federal Supreme Court, Iraq's highest court, ruled in his favour on 24 November 2008, stating it was no longer a crime to travel to Israel, and that Iraqis could travel to wherever they wanted. This led him to