( Newsvine ) Ayatollah Murtada al- Askari , a founding member of Iraq's Shiite Dawa party, which was banned under Saddam Hussein but now is the ruling Iraqi party, died Sunday in Iran, the party said.
Ayatollah Murtada al- Askari died after suffering a heart ailment and kidney problems, Iran's news agency, IRNA, reported.
The agency did not say where he died or how old he was. The Dawa party said he was about 100 years old, according to a statement, which described al- Askari as "one of the founders of the Dawa Islamic Party."
Al- Askari was born in the Iraqi city of Samarra and studied at the Hawza , the Shiite religious seminary, Dawa said.
He opposed Saddam Hussein's Baath party regime and forced to leave the country to "continue jihad from abroad," according to a Dawa party statement. It was not immediately known when al- Askari was ordered out of Iraq, but most of the group's leaders left the country after Saddam became president in 1979.
Dawa became the ruling party in Iraq when its leader, Ibrahim al- Jaafari , became interim prime minister after Iraq's first general election in January 2005. A year later, Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki replaced al- Jaafari in the post.
Dawa's rivalry with Saddam's Baath party dates back decades, and during Saddam's regime it was banned and many of its members were sentenced to death. Others were expelled to Shiite Iran, where they found sanctuary and financial support.
Saddam was executed in December after he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of 148 Shiites from the Iraqi town of Dujail after an assassination attempt organized by Dawa in 1982.
That attempt on Saddam's life was just one in a series of Dawa attacks against the Baath party. Dawa bombed the state-run Iraqi News Agency and the Iraqi Airways headquarters, and tried to kill Saddam again in 1987.