Aras Habib Karim (Arabic: اراس حبيب كريم; Kurdish: ئاراس حەبیب کەریم) is an Iraqi politician, businessman, and financier of Feyli Kurdish origin. He was close with Ahmed Chalabi and joined the Iraqi National Congress (INC) when it was founded in 1992, becoming its leader in 2015. He was one of the most prominent advocates for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Aras Habib is also the founder and owner of Al-Bilad Islamic Bank of Iraq. He was believed to be an Iranian agent by US authorities.
Biography
Aras Habib Karim was born in the 1960s in Baghdad to a Feyli Kurdish family long affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party. He was the son of Habib Muhammad Karim, who was the third secretary of the KDP.
His father, Habib Karim, was nominated by the KDP for vice-president of Iraq after the Iraqi–Kurdish Autonomy Agreement of 1970 was signed, which required the vice-president of Iraq to be Kurdish. However, the Iraqi government refused to approve the nomination, accusing him of having Iranian origin as he was a Feyli Kurd. This had also angered Mustafa Barzani. Habib Karim, the secretary general of the KDP in 1974-75, was also the brother-in-law of Zakiya Isma'il Haqqi, another Feyli Kurd who was the first female judge of Iraq who had founded and led the Kurdish Women's Union. After the activities of Mustafa Barzani collapsed in March 1975, Habib Karim and Zakiya Isma'il Haqqi accepted the amnesty offered by the Iraqi government and played no role in the Kurdish movement afterwards. Habib Karim had a brother named Ja'far Karim, a medical doctor in Baghdad, who was one of the founding members of the Rizgari party (the chief predecessor of the KDP) in 1945, and a member of the first political bureau of the KDP in 1946. Ja far was considered to be left-leaning, while Habib was considered as non-ideological and was made secretary general in 1964 after Barzani removed Ibrahim Ahmad and his faction from the party.
Shortly after founding the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, Ahmed Chalabi, with CIA support, held a conference in Vienna, Austria, aiming yo unite Iraqi dissidents against Saddam Hussein. In fall of 1992, Ahmed Chalabi was pushing for a wider conference held in Iraqi Kurdistan, under control of the Kurdish rebels. Ahmed Chalabi had earlier met Mustafa Barzani in the 1960s. Later, Mustafa Barzani introduced Ahmed Chalabi to Aras Habib Karim, who was young and educated, speaking Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, and English. Ahmed Chalabi claimed that Aras Habib Karim managed to get 400 cars for the conference at a moment's notice. Over time, he grew closer to Chalabi and became his head of operations, intelligence, security, and finances. In October, they held the conference in Kurdistan, and Chalabi assembled a team consisting of Aras Habib Karim, Nabil Musawi, Francis Brooke, and Zaab Sethna, who were a Feyli Kurd, a Shia Arab, an American Christian, and a Zoroastrian respectively. During the Iraqi-Kurdish Civil War, when Masoud Barzani invited the Iraqi troops to push the PUK out of Erbil, they had raided the INC headquarters, in which double agents within the INC helped execute over 100 people, although most escaped, including Aras Habib Karim, who fled to Turkey. During the raid, the Iraqi army burst into the room he was hiding in, and he hid behind a door and pointed a revolver to his chin, although he was undetected and narrowly escaped with his life.
Aras Habib Karim also ran the Information Collection Program of the INC, through which Chalabi had filtered much of the propaganda that fueled the rush to invade Iraq. Many Iraqis and INC defectors claimed that despite Ahmed Chalabi being the leader of the INC, it was really Aras Habib Karim who operated it. Aras Habib Karim had been a particular concern for the CIA when they were supporting Ahmed Chalabi and the INC. The CIA and British intelligence believed Aras Habib Karim to be an Iranian MOIS agent, and had told Stephen Cambone, although senior Bush administration officials rejected it. Aras Habib Karim had a cousin named Ali Yassin Karim, who worked a medic with the CIA, and was retained by the agency despite threats of dismissal after the intervention of James Woolsey.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Aras Habib Karim served as the director of intelligence for the Interior Ministry and as an under-secretary later on. After 2003, Aras Habib Karim became notorious, and it was well known in Baghdad that he and his men used seized Ba'athist documents to track former high-ranking Ba'athists, and had killed many of them. Ahmed Chalabi was accused of disrupting US intelligence activities in Iraq in spring 2004 by providing Iran with future US plans in Iraq, while NSA intercepts reportedly showed that Aras Habib Karim was on the payroll of Iranian intelligence. Based on the accusations, on May 20, 2004, the US Army raided Chalabi's home and INC offices in Baghdad. One of the arrest warrants was for Aras Habib Karim, although he had vanished around the time of the raid. Aras Habib Karim had escaped and went into hiding. A few days after the raid, Ahmed Chalabi accused the CIA Director George Tenet of having ruined his relationship with the Bush administration by making allegations against him, and claimed that even Aras Habib Karim previously had problems with Tenet. Ahmed Chalabi also firmly defended Aras Habib Karim against the accusations that he transferred intelligence to Iran. Although Aras Habib Karim was a target of the raids, he was still active a year later as the US had lost interest in him.
Aras Habib became leader of the INC after the death of Ahmed Chalabi, and also established the Aras Habib Youth Development Foundation. He also became the chairman of al-Bilad Islamic Bank. In 2018, Aras Habib Karim was blacklisted by the US Treasury, which accused him of having a history of smuggling money to Iranian-backed Iraqi groups and transferring funds from the IRGC-QF to Hezbollah in Lebanon through the Iraqi banking sector. The US accused Aras Habib Karim of being linked to Valiollah Seif, the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, as well as Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, a Lebanese Hezbollah financier, who was linked to the Central Bank of Iran through Abdallah Safi-al-Din, a cousin of Hassan Nasrallah. This relationship was nicknamed "the Bazzi Network" by the U.S. government. After the US sanctions, the Central Bank of Iraq ordered all financial institutions in the country to avoid Aras Habib Karim and Al-Bilad Islamic Bank. Aras Habib Karim denied the allegations of the US Treasury and claimed they were politically motivated, and also claimed that he submitted evidence for his innocence to the Central Bank of Iraq, which was the only authority he was subject to.
Aras Habib Karim attempted to win the seat reserved for Feyli Kurds in the November 2025 Iraqi elections.