Iraqi Leaders Elect Former Foe of Hussein as President

BAGHDAD - Iraq's leaders selected Fouad Massoum, a longtime Kurdish politician and former guerrilla fighter who took up arms against Saddam Hussein's regime, on Thursday as the country's new president, an important step in forming a new government that the international community and Iraq's religious authorities have called for and described as crucial to confronting a growing Sunni insurgency.

Mr. Massoum, 76, replaces Jalal Talabani, who has been president since 2005 and was seen as a rare unifying figure among Iraq's many factions but has been largely absent from the political scene since suffering a stroke in late 2012. The Kurds settled on Mr. Massoum after a late-night meeting Wednesday in Baghdad. After two rounds of voting in Parliament on Thursday, Mr. Massoum received 211 votes out of 269 cast and was immediately sworn in.

The next political step, the selection of a new prime minister, will be more difficult and fraught, especially as violent attacks are killing civilians on a daily basis and Sunni militants led by the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are consolidating their control of large parts of the north and west of Iraq. That process will determine the future of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has been in power since 2006 but who has become an increasingly polarizing figure as the insurgency has grown, setting off new rounds of sectarian violence.

Interactive Graphic: A Rogue State Along Two Rivers

Mr. Maliki has insisted that he will seek a third term as prime minister, but it appears increasingly unlikely that his efforts to remain in power will succeed. American officials, who believe Mr. Maliki has become too divisive to lead Iraq out of its current crisis, have been working behind the scenes to push Iraq's leaders to select someone else.

Other powerful factions appear arrayed against Mr. Maliki, as well. Iran, which exerts enormous influence here, has signaled that it would like to see new leadership, as have Iraq's powerful Shiite religious leaders and other political factions, Sunnis and Kurds but also many among the Shiite majority.

Before the vote for president, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, appeared at a news conference in Baghdad and said, 'Iraq is facing an existential threat but it can be overcome through the formation of a thoroughly inclusive government - a government that can address the concerns of all communities, including security, political, social and economic matters.'

For one day at least, even as violence continued to engulf the country, Iraqi leaders celebrated their selection of a new president.

'Everyone likes him,' Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite lawmaker, said of Mr. Massoum. 'He is a moderate man and was agreed to by everyone.' He added that Mr. Massoum is 'a man who refuses divisions, and this is what we look for in the Iraqi president.'

Mr. Massoum's rise to the presidency comes a week after Parliament elected Salim al-Jubouri, a moderate Sunni Islamist, to the position of speaker, which was the first step in forming a new government after national elections in April. The selection of Mr. Massoum, who holds a doctorate in Islamic philosophy and helped draft Iraq's new Constitution after the American-led invasion, was seen as another important step in establishing a new, inclusive government.

'This is for sure a great achievement,' said Hashim al-Hashimi, a political analyst. 'Now the road is paved to nominate the prime minister and form the government.'

Graphic: The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video

He said Mr. Massoum and the new speaker were 'well-known and acceptable by everyone inside the political process and outside.'

Under an informal political bargain forged after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Iraqi presidency is held by a Kurd, the speaker of Parliament is a Sunni Arab and the position of prime minister, the most powerful post, goes to a Shiite.

As if to emphasize the challenges the country faces, hours before Parliament voted on the presidency on Thursday, an attack on a convoy of prisoners near Baghdad left more than 60 people dead.

At dawn on Thursday, a convoy of prisoners left a prison on a military base in Taji, north of the capital, on its way to a more secure prison in Baghdad when it was struck by several explosions, according to a security official. The explosions were followed by a gunfight between militants and the men guarding the convoy, the official said. The official added that at least 54 prisoners were killed in the exchange, as well as seven Iraqi soldiers. Another official, though, who works in the Taji prison, said the inmates were executed after they left the facility.

The attack was similar to two cases last month, which took place in murky circumstances but are regarded as some of the worst recent sectarian abuses carried out by the Shiite-dominated government or affiliated militias, in which dozens of Sunni prisoners held on terrorism charges were killed.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in those attacks, inmates were executed by either Shiite militiamen or government security forces. One incident, at a jail in Baquba, northeast of the capital, left 44 Sunni prisoners dead. In the other incident, near Hilla, south of Baghdad, nearly 70 prisoners were executed on the side of a highway, four security sources said at the time.

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said that at least 255 prisoners in six Iraqi cities had been executed in recent weeks.

'The mass extrajudicial killings may be evidence of war crimes or crimes against humanity, and appear to be revenge killings for atrocities' committed by Sunni militants, the group said in its report.