Posted on 03/18/2002 12:22:09 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
A terrorist group operating in northern Iraq told the New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg that their organization "has received funds directly from al-Qaeda." In interviews conducted in a prison in Kurdish-controlled territory, captured members of Ansar al-Islam also alleged:
The intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam.
Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992.
A number of al-Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam.
Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.
If these charges are true," Goldberg writes in the current issue, "it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda is far closer than previously thought."
The prisoners Goldberg spoke to last month are kept in a jail that is run by the intelligence service of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose director told Goldberg that American intelligence officials had not visited the site. "The FBI and the CIA haven't come out yet," the director said.
According to Kurdish officials, Goldberg reported, "Ansar al-Islam grew out of an idea spread by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Osama bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaeda."
One official explained, "Zawahiri's philosophy is that you should fight the infidel even in the smallest village, that you should try to form Islamic armies everywhere. The Kurdish fundamentalists were influenced by Zawahiri."
The group has between five hundred and six hundred members, according to Kurdish officials, including Arab Afghans and at least thirty Iraqi Kurds who were trained in Afghanistan.
Last September, the officials said, representatives of Osama bin Laden gave Ansar al-Islam $300,000. These officials added that the real leader of Ansar al-Islam is an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, who has spent a great deal of time in bin Laden's training camps but is also, they said, an officer of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's principal intelligence service.
"A man named Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat," one official told Goldberg. "And he is Abu Wa'el's control officer."
Smuggling Al-Qaeda Members
Kurdish intelligence officials said that there is no proof that Ansar al-Islam has ever been involved in international terrorism or that Saddam Hussein's agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. But they claimed that several men associated with al-Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near the city of Halabja.
Two of these men, who go by the names Abu Yasir and Abu Muzaham, are high-ranking al-Qaeda members, they say. An Iraqi intelligence officer, Qassem Hussein Muhammad, one of the prisoners with whom Goldberg spoke, said that his own involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri after being assigned to help guard him.
After reports surfaced that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American agents, Qassem says, he was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find out what was going on. "That's when I was captured," he said. Asked if he was sure that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side, Qassem said, "He's an employee of the Mukhabarat. He's the actual decision-maker in the group -- Ansar al-Islam -- but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat."
In the prison, Goldberg also spoke to a young Iraqi Arab named Haqi Ismail, whom Kurdish officials described as a middle-to high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, who was captured as he tried to get into Kurdistan three weeks after the start of the American attack on Afghanistan.
Jawad, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab who is a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz, and whom Kurdish intelligence officials said was most recently employed by bin Laden, told Goldberg that he began to smuggle for bin Laden in the late 1990s.
Liquid Might Be Bio-Weapon
In 2000, Jawad's al-Qaeda contact told him to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad told Goldberg that he had no idea what liquid was inside the motors, but he assumed that it was some type of chemical or biological weapon.
"There's been a relationship between the Mukhabarat and the people of al-Qaeda since 1992," Jawad said.
In the articel,"The Great Terror," Goldberg also provided a comprehensive account of Saddam's massive conventional, chemical, and possibly biological attacks on the Kurds in the late 1980s, during which as many as 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq were killed, out of a population of about four million.
Christine Gosden, an English geneticist who has been studying the attacks on the Kurds since 1998, says, "The Iraqi government was using chemistry to reduce the population of Kurds. The Holocaust is still having its effect. The Jews are fewer in number now than they were in 1939. That's not natural. Now, if you take out 200,000 men and boys from Kurdistan, you've affected the population structure. There are a lot of widows who are not having children."
Gosden believes that it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience serious chemical- and biological-weapons attacks. "Please understand," she said, "the Kurds were for practice."
Gosden told Goldberg that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. "It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA," she says, pointing out that, "for Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."
Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who was formerly a high official in Saddam's nuclear program, told Goldberg that he had direct knowledge of the Army's plans for Halabja. "The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as 'How far are the dead from the cannisters?'"
Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist in Kurdistan who led Goldberg on his tour of Halabja, and other experts "now believe that Halabja and other places in Kurdistan were struck by a combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin (the agent used in the Tokyo subway attack) and VX, a potent nerve agent."
Baban told Goldberg that the Iraqis could conceivably have used aflatoxin as well; aflatoxin is a biological agent that causes long-term liver damage. Baban said, "Here is a civilian population exposed to chemical and possibly biological weapons, and people are developing many varieties of cancers and congenital abnormalities."
In 1995, the Iraqis admitted that they had weaponized aflatoxin, Charles Duelfer, then the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission weapons-inspection team in Iraq, told Goldberg. "This was the first time Iraq actually agreed to discuss the Presidential origins of these programs," Duelfer said.
Although "it is unclear what biological and chemical weapons Saddam possesses today," Goldberg wrote, August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, provided information on another type of weapon. "It is our estimate," he said, "that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years."
For a second, I thought this Goldberg guy must be nuts, talking with an Islamic terrorist group; he has no memory of Daniel Pearl? But then I noted that the interviews took place in a Kurdish prison....
The question isn't whether these nutcases receive alQueda funds, but what type of help alQueda received from the government of Saddam Hussein?
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