Baha Araji (also transliterated Bahaa al-Aaraji) is an Iraqi politician and a member of the Iraqi National Assembly. He is a spokesman for the United Iraqi Alliance and a member of the Sadrist Movement which is led by Muqtada as-Sadr. He is also currently the head of the Ahrar bloc.
He was a member of the committee that drafted the Constitution of Iraq, where he opposed the proposal for Shi'ite and Sunni Arab Regions. [1]
During coalition negotiations in 2006 he strongly opposed the inclusion of Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National List in the government, saying they represented a red line drawn in blood. This was a reference to the crackdown that Allawi's Iraqi Interim Government launched against the Mahdi Army.
Personal life: Baha Araji was born in kazimiyah, Baghdad to a large working class family. He was the 5th oldest child of 11 (6 boys and 5 girls) to Hussein Al-Araji, a taxi driver. Education was always important to him despite few opportunities handed to him, nonetheless he excelled in school and soon attended Baghdad University where he gained a first class BA in law. On February the 12th 1988 he married Azhar Al-Rubai a fellow law graduate also from Baghdad and soon after they had their firstborn Aeat (1989) followed by Alaa (1992), Mohammed (1997) and Hadi (2007). Araji currently lives in Baghdad but frequently makes trips to the UK to visit his family including his young granddaughter Zainab.
Iraq parliamentary Elections 2010: Baha Araji stood in the 2010 Iraqi Parliamentary Elections for the Nasiriyah district as candidate no.2 for the National Iraqi Alliance. He won a seat in the new government formation with over 40 000 raw votes jus to his name, he was the most popular candidate in the Nasiriyah district. He was nominated as one of the ten names on the sadarist mock election ballot and received 5% of the votes, however the elections outcomes were discarded due to allegations of the voting being biased.