Iran's incumbent President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has formally announced his bid in the country's June vote.

Ahmadinejad will be the standard-bearer of the Principlist camp, which will be facing off against the Reformists in the country's June 12 presidential election.

He was born in 1956 into a working class family near the town of Garmsar-approximately 90 kilometers east of the capital Tehran.

One year after his birth, Ahmadinejad's family moved to Iran's mega capital Tehran. In the capital the future President of Iran studied hard at school and at the same time worked to as he puts it “to cover a portion of my family's expenses and also my educational costs.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad took the nationwide entrance exam three years before the revolution, where he ranked 132nd out of 400,000 participants that year. He soon enrolled in the Iran's prestigious University of Science and Technology (IUST) as an undergraduate student of civil engineering.

He was accepted to a Master of Science program at the same school in 1986, and eventually received his doctorate in 1997 in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning.

According to the President's biography as a child he used to read newspapers with the help of other family members. That experience left a profound mark on his feelings toward his country and its ruler of the time, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

“My father used to buy newspaper all the time. I remember one day, when I was in first grade, by looking through a newspaper I read the news of the capitulation passage by the Shah's so called “parliament.” Even though I did not understand the meaning of that issue at that time, but due to the protests and the objections of the religious schools of thoughts … and the relentless reaction of the Shah, I realized that Mohammad Reza attempted to add another page to his vicious case history which was the humiliation and indignity of the Iranian people versus Americans,” the president recalls on his weblog.

Like most Iranians Mr. Ahmadinejad welcomed the revolution in Iran which rocked the country and the world in 1979. After the revolution he voluntarily joined the Revolutionary Guards and served in covert operations against the forces of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his eight year war against the young Islamic Republic during the 1980s.

He has served as governor to both Iran's northwestern cites of Maku and Khoy in West Azarbaijan Province in the 1980s, advised governor general of Kurdistan Province for two years and eventually served as governor general of Ardabil Province in 1993.

Ahmadinejad was appointed mayor of Iran's capital in 2003, and was included in a list of 65 finalists for World Mayor in 2005. He was among 3 strong candidates for the top-10 list but became non-eligible because of his resignation after his election to the presidency.

Ahmadinejad, who is currently experiencing his first term as president, is better known for his domestic policies of petrol rationing and his handling of the windfall oil revenues in late 2008. His criticism of Israel's handling of the Palestinian issue and what he calls the misuse of the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel on Palestinian territories has won him enemies within the West and friends within the Middle East public.