Sulaimaniyah, Iraq – President Jalal Talabani is ill and has flown to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment, his office said Sunday, adding there was “no cause for worry.”
The 73-year-old president was unconscious when an ambulance rushed him to the hospital in his hometown of Sulai maniyah, a doctor in the Kurdish city said.
“After his condition stabilized, the doctors advised him to go to Jordan for a complete checkup,” the doctor said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
The brief statement by Talabani’s office said he had fallen ill because of “continuing hard work over the past few days.”
Talabani, a Kurd, appeared in public Saturday in Sulaimaniyah where he met with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Massoud Barzani, leader of the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
An official at Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said the president has a long history of fainting when he is exhausted – a condition dating to his years as a Kurdish guerrilla leader fighting Saddam Hussein’s regime decades ago.
The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
