"I will spare no effort to strengthen national unity, brotherly ties between the Kurds and Arabs, and for unity within Kurdistan," he pledged after being sworn in before an elected Kurdish parliament.

In post Saddam-Iraq, the country has two Kurdish presidents, with Jalal Talabani, a former rival of Barzani, elected by the parliament in Baghdad as president of the state.

Only 14 years ago, millions of Kurds took flight to the snow-covered peaks along the borders with Turkey and Iran after a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.

Under a Western security umbrella, the Kurds returned to set up self-rule in the three northern provinces of Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniya.

Barzani, who turns 60 next year, cuts a short and chubby figure, reserved, and always wearing the traditional Kurdish costume of baggy pants, a cummerbund and red-and-white tribal scarf wrapped around his head.

"He wears this outfit... It wasn't all that long ago... he would have been killed for wearing it," US President George W. Bush said when the two leaders met at the White House in October.

The former warlord, who spent his youth in the mountains fighting a succession of Iraqi regimes, refuses to have his peshmerga force disbanded or their mission redefined.

In case of civil war, Kurdistan would already have the nucleus of an army of its own.

In mid-November, Barzani warned in an interview with Turkish television that the Iraqi Kurds would have no choice but to proclaim independence in the event of civil war.

While independence was a "natural and legitimate right" for Iraqi Kurds, they would "at this stage" implement the new constitution which lays down a "democratic federal and pluralist" future for Iraq, he said.

Turkey fears a declaration of independence by Iraq's Kurds would inflame a rebellion by separatists within its own large Kurdish minority.

In June, Barzani kicked up a storm when he protested over the omission of the "federal" reference to Iraq when the government of Ibrahim Jaafari was being sworn in.

It risked a break-up of the alliance between the majority Shiites and the Kurds who swept the elections, he warned, before the text was modified to address his concerns.

His political line is also often controversial, having stated in an interview with the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat that relations between the Kurds and Israel would not amount to a "crime" despite the lack of Iraqi-Israeli ties.

And when a meeting of Iraqi political factions in Cairo last month referred to the "resistance" to foreign occupation, Barzani weighed in again.

"We don't call what is happening in Iraq resistance, but terrorism," Barzani told the Kurdish regional assembly. "Foreign forces are liberating forces, not occupying troops."

Born in 1946 in Mahabad, Iranian Kurdistan, his family hails from the Barzan region of northeast Iraqi Kurdistan.

The son of Kurdish nationalist leader Mustafa Barzani, he joined the fight for an independent Kurdistan as a teenager. In 1979 he took over leadership of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) from his father.

In July 1983, Saddam Hussein's security forces arrested about 8,000 male members of the Barzani clan in the northern province of Arbil. They were transported to southern Iraq and have not been heard of since.

Although they both fought Saddam, between 1994 and 1998 the KDP and Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan waged war, in fighting which cost some 3,000 lives, until Washington brokered peace in 1998.

Barzani even turned to help from Saddam in 1996 to evict the PUK from Arbil.

The citadel city was the capital of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan at the time and the seat of a parliament born of the Iraqi Kurds' first ever elections in 1992 that resulted in a 50-50 sharing deal with Talabani.

But in the post-Saddam era, Talabani and Barzani struck a deal in May that Barzani should rule Iraq's three northern provinces for the next four years, ending decades of political discord.