By April 2006, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a conservative Shiite, “had failed to form a coalition government–he had no support among the Sunnis and Kurds–and had been unable to rein in the militias that had been fomenting violence across Iraq since the Samarra bombing two months earlier. …Jaafari finally bowed out on April 20 [2006]. ‘I cannot accept being a barricade or looking like a barricade,’ he said in a late night television address in Iraq. The next day the Shiite political bloc nominated a new functionary, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a little known ally of Jaafari who had fled Iraq when he was threatened with a death sentence under Saddam Hussein.”
– Elisabeth Bumiller, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, Pages 285-286