Can you tell me about Prime Minister al-Maliki?

I know he was sentenced to death by Sadaam and went into exile from Iraq. From there he went to Iran and later Syria as the head of the Dawa Party. In Syria, he headed the party's Jihad Office, a branch responsible for directing activists and guerrillas fighting Saddam Hussein's regime from outside of Iraq. So I quess the question is who is the Dawa party and the Jihad office? What do they do and why wasn't his death sentence carried out, did he simply escape?
Just a footnote but doesn't this mean he is no stranger to terrorism himself? Is he still in bed with Syria and Iran? Why is he so confident that he can handle Iraq now and facing an invasion from Turkey if he can't get the PKK under control?
I know thats a lot of questions but please tell me what you can.

tis ur lucky day dude

Nouri Kamel Mohammed Hassan al-Maliki (Arabic: 賳賵乇賷 賰丕賲賱 丕賱賲丕賱賰賷, transliterated N奴r墨 K膩mil al-M膩lik墨; born c. 1950), also known as Jawad al-Maliki, is the State Prime Minister of Iraq. He is a Shi'a Muslim, and is secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party. Al-Maliki and his government succeeded the Iraqi Transitional Government. His 37-member Cabinet was approved by the National Assembly and sworn in on May 20, 2006.

Al-Maliki's constitutional mandate will last until 2010. On April 26, 2006, al-Maliki's office announced that he would thenceforth use the first name Nouri instead of his pseudonym Jawad.

In 1980, the Saddam Hussein government sentenced al-Maliki to death for his active role in the Dawa party and thereafter, he lived in exile, first in Iran and later in Syria. In Syria, he headed the party's Jihad Office, a branch responsible for directing activists and guerrillas fighting Saddam Hussein's regime from outside of Iraq. He was elected chairman of the Joint Action Committee, a Damascus-based opposition coalition that led to the founding of the Iraqi National Congress, a United States-backed body of opposition to the Saddam Hussein regime which the Dawa Party participated in between 1992 and 1995. Some foreign diplomats who were responsible for maintaining links with the Iraqi opposition in Syria before the war, have maintained that al-Maliki was never more than a minor figure in the period before 2003. While in exile, al-Maliki adopted the pseudonym "Jawad", which he used until after his return to Iraq.

Returning home after Saddam's fall, he became the deputy leader of the De-Baathification Commission of the Iraqi Interim Government, formed to purge former Baath Party officials from the military and government. Many Sunni Arabs deeply resented the commission, viewing it as part of a Shi'a conspiracy to take power in Iraq, even though the Baath Party officials affected came from both the Shi'a and Sunni communities.

Al-Maliki was elected to the transitional National Assembly in January 2005. He was considered a tough negotiator in drawn-out deliberations over the new constitution, and was the senior Shi'ite member of the committee that drafted the new constitution that was passed in October 2005.