Massoud Barzani, Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) chief, was Sunday elected the first president of northern Iraq's Kurdistan region, reports Xinhua.

The 111-member Kurdish parliament met in Arbil, some 350 km north of here, and elected Barzani to be the first four-year-term president for Iraq's northern Kurdistan region, which includes Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah.

The Kurdish parliament said Barzani's election followed four months of talks with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a rival of KDP, which is led by Barzani's former rival and current Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Barzani will be sworn in Tuesday as bad weather conditions prevented officials from flying to the region from Baghdad to attend the ceremony Sunday, parliament officials said.

Barzani was born in 1946 in the Iranian part of Kurdistan. He had fought with the Kurdish militia (Peshmurga) against successive Iraqi governments since 1960s and became head of the party in 1979.

Analysts said the election of Barzani could help gain unity between KDP and PUK, the two main Kurdish parties, grant internal and external legitimacy for their entity and beef up their pressure in stating the ethnic-based federalism in the forthcoming permanent constitution, a draft of which will be in place by mid August and put to a referendum two months later.

Iraqi Kurds, accounting for about 20 percent of the nation's population, have been granted autonomy after the Gulf War in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was defeated by the US military.