Norway probes four refugees suspected of al-Qaeda links

According to Norwegian media reports, it has helped al-Qaeda develop and produce chemical weapons.

Here's a very interesting article on Krekar and some of the goings on in the region.

Militant Kurds training al-Qaida fighters

Mountain camps Extremists suspected of testing chemical weapons and links to Iraq

Michael Howard in Halabjah, Iraqi Kurdistan
Friday August 23, 2002
The Guardian

High up in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, a small but powerful Islamist group with links to al-Qaida has for months created a major security headache for the region. This week it attracted the attention of the Bush administration, which suspects it of trying to develop chemical weapons.

The Ansar al-Islam (supporters of Islam) is an extreme Kurdish Salafist group whose 500 fighters have taken control of a series of villages in a remote mountainous area of eastern Kurdistan on the border with Iran.

Intelligence officials in the Kurdish self-rule area say the group is also providing a refuge and major training base for 100-150 al-Qaida fighters fleeing Afghanistan. There are also reports that the group is testing the effect of toxic agents such as cyanide gas and ricin on farm animals.

The "foreigners," as the trainees are called, are kept well away from the Kurdish villagers in the region and have already begun to establish a cave complex in the sides of the towering Sharam mountain on the Iranian border. The area has been dubbed the Kurdish Tora Bora by locals.

The largely inaccessible peaks and plains have been surrounded by mines and are defended by a militia of around 500 Ansar guerrillas. Military advisers for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the south-eastern region of Iraqi Kurdistan, are said to be at a loss as to how to deal with the group.

An officer of the PUK's Kurdish intelligence organisation, which has infiltrated the area, said: "They are definitely al-Qaida. And we need help to deal with them."

Despite the Kurds' claims, a true picture of Ansar still remains unclear. And some accuse the PUK of exaggerating the group's links with al-Qaida to draw in US support.

Interviews with Ansar members arrested by the PUK appear however to confirm the claims of connections to the international al-Qaida network, and to the inner circle of Osama bin Laden. They also suggest the group receives logistical, financial and political support from such strange ideological bedfellows as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi regime, each with their own reasons for supporting a group that will serve to weaken the largely pro-western Kurds-either during a US-led attack on Iraq or in the "nation building" that might follow.

"This unlikely triangle of Iran, Iraq and al-Qaida in support of a small radical Islamic group based in the Iraqi Kurdish area serves to preoccupy Kurdish forces and possibly sideline them from participation in a US offensive," said the Kurdish intelligence officer.

So far, the extent of Baghdad's involvement with Ansar is largely circumstantial. Barham Salih, the prime minister of the PUK regional government in Sulaymaniyah, said: "This is a matter of speculation. I can't give you hard truth one way or the other. But I can ask in whose interests it is to damage the Kurds at this time."

Though Saddam has been condemned as an unbeliever by Osama bin Laden, analysts say he would not balk at helping an Islamic militant group if he thought it would be to his advantage.

Kurds claim to have captured militants who have told them of secret meetings with agents of the Iraqi mukhabarat. The PUK has also seized some of the TNT used by Ansar in its suicide attacks. The TNT, say Kurdish explosives experts, is produced by the military industrialisation department in Baghdad, and is released only at the say of the head of Iraqi military intelligence.

Local newspapers in Kurdistan have quoted villagers in the Ansar area as claiming that trucks laden with arms have arrived from the government-controlled area. There have also been reports of western military advisers visiting the region and seeing members of Iraq's Republican Guard in the area around Tawela.

Some of the prisoners in the PUK cells in Sulaymaniyah claim to have had personal contacts with al-Qaida leaders, including an Iranian Arab, who said he smuggled arms from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Another prisoner in the hands of the PUK is a senior Iraqi intelligence agent who says he was dispatched to the Kurdish area to make contact with Abu Wael, the mufti of Ansar Islam and one of its chief link men with the al-Qaida leadership.

Ansar al-Islam started life as Jund al-Islam, a radical offshoot of an Iranian-backed Kurdish Islamic group, based in Halabjah. A city long the cultural heart of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was also the scene of one of Saddam's most horrific crimes in his attempt to wipe Kurds from the map during a chemical weapons attack in 1988.

After their formation, Jund seized Tawela and Biyara and declared jihad against the secular Kurdish authorities. There were almost immediate armed clashes with the PUK.

During a battle on September 23 last year, the Jund slit the throats and mutilated the bodies of more than 20 PUK peshmerga fighters (meaning those who face death). "They used swords and machetes," a witness said. "They were speaking Arabic and Persian." They also at tempted to assassinate the PUK's prime minister Barham Salih.

Recently, they have outraged moderate Muslim opinion in the region by desecrating Sufi shrines in their area, an act reminiscent of the bombing of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan.

In the winter the Jund merged with another small group called Islah (reform) to form Ansar al-Islam. But Ansar is not just the product of infighting among local Kurdish Islamist groups. The ideological and material influence of al-Qaida has been there since its inception.

Its leader is the elusive figure of Mullah Krekar, a charismatic 46-year-old Kurd whose links with Afghanistan, like many of his followers, date back to the jihad against the Soviet invasion.

In Pakistan in the 1980s, Krekar studied Islamic jurisprudence under the Palestinian ideologue Abdullah Azzam, the founder of al-Qaida and mentor of Osama bin Laden.

In a rare interview, which took place before the September 11 attacks, Krekar described Osama bin Laden as the "jewel in the crown of the Muslim nation".

Mullah Krekar enjoys asylum status in Norway, where his wife and four children live. His trips to Europe are regularly followed by influxes of thousands of dollars into the Ansar coffers; his brother Khaled is in charge of the group's treasury.

But Krekar disappeared in Iran about two months ago. Norwegian television said yesterday that he had not been seen in Oslo, where he lives, since the September 11 attacks.

'Al Qaeda' influence grows in Iraq

By Jim Muir
BBC Middle East correspondent

A pocket of militant Islamic extremists, believed to be linked to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda movement, is causing havoc in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq.

The presence of the violently anti-American group, known as the Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam), is likely to attract increasing attention as US moves to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime gather pace.

A number of Washington's regional adversaries - including both Baghdad and Iran - appear to have a finger in the Ansar pie.

The Ansar are largely made up of Iraqi Kurds belonging to several radical Islamic groups which merged late last year.

They control a string of villages in the plains and mountains between the town of Halabja and the mountain ridge which marks Iraq's border with Iran.

But many of the Ansar's Kurdish members are believed to have returned from Afghanistan, where they had gone for training and to wage jihad (Holy War) alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Kurdish leaders who run the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan, and who have suffered heavily at the Ansar's hands, say that at least 20 or 30 Arabs linked to al-Qaeda have also come from Afghanistan to join the Islamist pocket.

'Iraq's Tora Bora'

The area has been dubbed "Iraq's Tora Bora" by some locals after the al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan.

The worst atrocity occurred in the village of Khela Hama, near Halabja, which was overrun by radical Islamic fighters last year.

Kurdish forces have suffered losses at the hands of Ansar.

They captured and massacred 42 Peshmerga guerrillas from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the eastern half of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Some of the victims' hands were tied behind their backs when they died. The aftermath was filmed by the Ansar themselves, only to have the tape captured in a PUK counter-attack.

Since then, clashes with the PUK have continued. On 4 July, Ansar militants attacked PUK positions and killed eight Peshmergas, though the attack was beaten back.

Exactly who is involved with the Ansar and in what way is not clear.

The PUK leader, Jalal Talabani, says the one certain thing is that they had ties with al-Qaeda and Afghanistan:

"Many of them were trained there, and there are now about 20 to 30 Arabs who are trained from Afghanistan and who also came here to Kurdistan, and are now with them. Even their leaders are from these Arabs."

One of those leaders is Abu Wa'il, a former Iraqi army officer.

Shadowy connections

A captured Iraqi intelligence officer of 20 years' standing, Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, who is held by the PUK, said Abu Wa'il is actively manipulating the Ansar on behalf of Iraqi intelligence.

Abu Iman al-Baghdadi: "Some of Ansar trained in Iraq"

"I was captured by the Kurds after Iraqi intelligence sent me to check what was happening with Abu Wa'il, following rumours that he'd been captured and handed over the CIA," al-Baghdadi said.

He added that Baghdad smuggles arms to the Ansar through the Kurdish area, and is using the group to make problems for the PUK, one of the opposition factions ranged against Saddam Hussein.

"The Ansar's basic allegiance is to al-Qaeda, but some of them were trained in Iraq and went Afghanistan," he said, interviewed in a Kurdish prison.

"When the Americans attacked, they came here through Iran. Iraq is supporting them and using them to carry out attacks."

But Kurdish sources also believe that Iran is arming and training Ansar members, despite Tehran's denials. Ansar wounded are also said to have been treated in Iranian hospitals.

"The Iranian Government always plans to make Islamic security along its border with Kurdistan. Iran is also using these Islamic groups as a pressure card on the secular groups in Kurdistan," says Shwar Mohammad, editor of the Kurdish weekly Hawlati and one of the few people to have interviewed the Ansar leader Mullah Krekar.

Iranian links

Iran has for some time had a strong relationship with the PUK, but is said to be displeased with the Kurdish groups' secret discussions with the Americans about plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Mullah Krekar: "Democracy is rejected by Islam"

As was the case with the Taleban in Afghanistan, there is no love lost between Tehran and the Iraqi ruler.

But Iran equally has no desire to see Saddam displaced by an American-led regime change that would put US forces on Iran's western flank.

The Ansar leader, Mullah Krekar - his real name is Najmuddin Faraj - has citizenship in Norway where he once sought refuge.

He left Iraqi Kurdistan recently, supposedly to raise funds in Norway, but the authorities there say he has not turned up.

So his current whereabouts are a mystery.

A stern young man with a black beard and black-and-white turban, he gave Hawlati's Shwan Mohammad a stark vision of the brand of Islam to which he and his followers subscribe.

"Democracy is based on four principles which are rejected by Islam," he said. "As far as Islam is concerned, democracy, from beginning to end, is heresy."

If both Iraq and Iran are indeed involved with the Ansar in one way or another, that would make strange bedfellows of the two neighbours who fought a long and bloody war through most of the 1980s and remain on difficult terms.

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