Adil Abdul-Mahdi al-Muntafiki (, born 1 January 1942) is an Iraqi politician who served as Prime Minister of Iraq from October 2018 until May 2020. Abdul-Mahdi is an economist and was one of the vice presidents of Iraq from 2005 to 2011. He formerly served as minister of finance in the Interim government and Oil Minister from 2014 to 2016. Abdul-Mahdi is a former member of the powerful Shi'a party the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC. Long based in neighboring Iran, the group opposed a United States administration while holding close ties with the other, U.S.-backed, groups that opposed Saddam Hussein, including the Kurds and the Iraqi National Congress. Abdul-Mahdi submitted his formal resignation as Prime Minister in November 2019, following widespread protests over political corruption and violent police responses. Background Mahdi was born in Baghdad in 1942, the son of a Shiite cleric, Abdul-Mahdi, originally from Dhi Qar Governorate, who was the Minister of Education in Iraq's monarchy. He attended high school at Baghdad College, an elite American Jesuit secondary school. After graduating, he attended Baghdad University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1963. He worked as a secretary for the Iraqi foreign ministry in 1965 and was an early supporter of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, but left due to ideological disagreements. In 1969, he moved to France where he worked for French think tanks and edited magazines in French and Arabic. In 1972 he obtained another Master of Arts degree in political economy from the University of Poitiers. He later obtained a PhD in economics. Political career In the 1970s, Abdul-Mahdi was a leading member of the Iraqi Communist Party. The party split into two separate factions, the ICP-Central Committee, which was more accommodating of the military governments that had ruled Iraq since 1958, and the ICP-Central Leadership, which rejected all forms of cooperation of what it regarded as anti-progressive regimes, in 1967. Abdul-Mahdi joined the ICP-Central Leadership, and continued being active until it gradually disappeared by the early 1980s. By that time, Abdul-Mahdi adopted Iranian Islamic ideas, eventually merging with the Islamists when Ayatollah Khomeini eradicated the communists and liberal opposition groups in Iran. Abdul-Mahdi continued his association with Iran and gradually amalgamated his group within the ICP-Central Leadership with the Iranians, rejecting his Marxist past and devoting all his group's time to propagating Khomeini's ideas in France, where he lived