Zebari has held the job since a few months after the April 2003 US-led invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, chosen again as Iraq's top diplomat under premier Ibrahim Jaafari in 2005.

A daunting challenge awaits the jowly, rotund figure from one of the major Kurdish tribes who, true to his roots, fought as a peshmerga against the repression of Saddam's Baath party regime.

Zebari climbed up the hierarchy of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) run by his nephew, Massud Barzani, being in charge of the KDP's foreign relations for more than 10 years.

But unlike Barzani he does not wear traditional Kurdish dress, rather the sharp suits of the West where he has established a network of high-level contacts.

A fluent English speaker, his language is also less provocative than the occasional tirades of Barzani. Zebari prefers a joke or even silence to turn round an awkward situation and still get his message across to the media.

In his almost three years in the job, Zebari's main task has been to obtain economic, political and security aid for his strife-torn country. His other challenge has been to dissipate frequent crises with Iraq's Arab neighbours.

Zebari has also accused Arab states of not doing enough to help Iraq and Damascus of not helping in the fight against Islamic militants.

As an ethnic Kurd, his reception among his Arab neighbours has been at times chilly, and for many Arabs he was the public face of the US-dominated Iraq.

In press conferences outside Iraq, Arab journalists often dropped their usual deference to public figures and hurled openly hostile questions at Zebari.

Born in 1953 at Aqrah, north of the Kurdish capital Arbil, Zebari has a degree in political science from Jordan and a masters in social development from the University of Essex.

As a student in England in the late 1970s, he became secretary general of the society of Kurdish students in Europe, making contact particularly with left-leaning political groups.

Zebari returned to Iraqi Kurdistan after the onset of the 1980-1988 war with Iran. The Kurdish rebellion was growing and he joined the peshmerga while continuing to look after KDP interests in Europe, as well as in Syria and Lebanon.

As Saddam's forces cracked down on the Kurds, including the notorious 1988 gas attack that killed at least 5,000 Kurds at Halabja, Zebari went to London to alert international opinion.

He became more widely known for promoting the Kurdish cause during the 1991 Gulf War, which closed with a rebellion put down ferociously by Baghdad's army before US-British airpower provided protection.

The minister has in the past decade or so moved between London and Washington, where he kept an office, meeting high-ranking officials from NATO and the Pentagon.

Zebari returned to Iraqi Kurdistan in February 2003 as war looked inevitable and then moved to Baghdad at the end of April after the rout of Baathist forces.