Posted on 04/08/2002 11:20:00 PM PDT by Balata
Al Qaeda terrorists target Iraqi Kurds William Safire The New York Times Tuesday, April 9, 2002.
Sixty Islamic terrorists, trained in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden, are holed up in the town of Biyara in northern Iraq, guests of Saddam Hussein. Their assignment is to infiltrate the no-flight zone and to kill the Kurdish leaders, who Saddam assumes will be allied with the United States in his overthrow. This is the same assignment that Al Qaeda performed for the Taliban last Sept. 9, when a terrorist suicide team murdered the most popular Afghan leader, Ahmed Massoud. That assassination was intended to weaken anti-Taliban forces if the United States responded to the Sept.11 attacks by hitting bin Laden's base in Afghanistan.
. Ten days ago, a suicide team of three terrorists was dispatched by Saddam's Qaeda affiliate into the Kurdish area of Iraq protected by the U.S. and British air forces. A Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani (no kin to the Taliban), was meeting in Sulaimaniya with two U.S. diplomats, Ryan Crocker and David Pearce. With that meeting guarded by scores of Kurdish pesh merga fighters, the terrorists targeted the home of Barham Salih, 41, the pro-Western regional prime minister. Their grenades and gunfire missed his appearance at his front door by 10 seconds. Five Kurdish guards were killed and two of the assassins died in the return fire. The third terrorist was wounded and caught. "I came to kill and be killed," he pleaded, but the pesh merga - many of whose relatives were ambushed, captured and beheaded by Saddam's Islamic surrogates two months ago - saved him for interrogation. He is the source of the intelligence about the 60 Qaeda terrorists in Biyara carrying out Saddam's assassination plans.
. That intelligence seems of little interest to the Central Intelligence Agency, which failed to inform members of the National Security Council of this incident until my query last week.
. Maybe it has no agents on the ground (though U.S. diplomats were); maybe its director is distracted by his high-visibility diplomatic chores; maybe it is sulking because the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker went where no spook had gone before.
. Whatever the excuse, it's unlikely that one dollar of the $30 billion intelligence budget (which includes covert operations) has gone to provide one automatic rifle, one mortar, or one anti-tank rocket to the 70,000 Kurdish fighters who would make up the most dependable indigenous ally in any coalition to overthrow Saddam.
. President George W. Bush constantly evokes Saddam's poison gas attack in 1988 on the Kurds in Halabja, which killed many thousands of innocents, as evidence of the dictator's willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.
. Understandably, neither Bush nor Colin Powell wants to recall the elder Bush's blunder that allowed Saddam to keep his gunships and slaughter Kurds who trusted the United States to support their uprising after the Gulf War victory. Ever since that debacle, America has protected the Kurds and they are grateful for U.S. air cover.
. As a result, they have built the only democratic government and rudimentary free-enterprise system in the Middle East since the birth of Israel. Contrast the Kurds' recent progress with that of Palestinians - a people burdened with corrupt leaders, kept in squalid refugee camps for generations by Arab despots and fed a diet of hatred.
. Afflicted by tribal tensions at the start of their decade of freedom, the two Kurdish factions have come together. After Saddam's recent assassination attempt, the urbane Jalal Talabani was embraced by Massoud Barzani, as 100,000 Kurds marched through a heavy rain at the murdered guards' funeral.
. Kurds now dream of an autonomous region within a democratic Iraq, which would be acceptable to Turkey with its large Kurdish minority. If Bush is serious about overthrowing Saddam before that avatar of arrogance gets the power to obliterate Washington, he cannot count on a colonels' coup or a coat-holding coalition of craven caliphs. America has already had to begin abandoning its bases in Saudi Arabia. Joining in liberating Iraq will be the British, Turks and Kurds.
. The Kurds, though fierce fighters, cannot be provided with modern arms and trained to use them overnight. Saddam, allied with bin Ladenesque cadres, has begun his offensive - diplomatic at the United Nations, economic with oil-embargo threats, terrorist to his north. Time is short for a counterattack.
Eeeeoooowwww, I bet he pleaded. It's good to know that the Kurds have had our air support, and yes, I think they will be our Northern Alliance, if we ever attact that is. It's looking very iffy right now.
This looks like the opening Act for the war on Iraq, which will be playing soon at a TV near you.
Looks like the British, Turks and Kurds are our coalition for Iraq. The British we can always count on. The Turks are caught in the middle. And the Kurds are looking to carve up part of Iraq for themselves that wont p!ss off the Turks.
There are so many similarities here, and with Sept. 9th it's scary - almost.
Who's playbook was this taken from, Hussein's or Bin Laden's?? They obviously operate from the same playbook, IMO. I've been convinced since Sept. 11th that Hussein had a hand in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11th. Whether it was his plan or Bin Laden's, or Hussein providing the funding it's irrelevant to me. Hussein must be taken out.
I'm puzzled/concerned/angry that the CIA has totally dropped the ball on passing on the intelligence reports to NSA and presumably the President. If the assasination attempt would've been successful and Jalal Talabani was killed, it would've been a MAJOR embarassment to President Bush ... assuming we the public ever found out about it! It very well could've been the end of the Kurdish pro-democracy leadership in Northern Iraq.
Now that we know what's really going on in Northern Iraq, and we know the Kurds have been waiting for the US to aid them (we are, and are currently in the area training them) we have a real shot at bringing Hussein down and turning Iraq into the Arab world's first democracy.
Boy, wouldn't that rock the House of Faud to its foundation!!!
The coddling of the palestinians... sends a dangerous signal to the kurds... or any other potential allies... a fear that we might not fully, publicly and forcefully back their drive to democracy...
We need to keep focussing on the needs and hopes of ALL of our potential allies and maintiain pressure on this administration and let those who seek democracy KNOW... like T. Blair said... "we are with you to the end."
This is crunch time. I hope as a nation we are up to the challenge of redrawing the lines of the World's map.
Where do you get this? My reading of the article is that he was asking the pesh merga to kill him (presumably so he wouldn't be liable to torture or other unpleasant means of intelligence extraction) and that the pesh merga, many of whose members had recently lost friends and family to Saddam's predations, had the presence of mind and discipline to hold him for interrogation instead.
The PKK is a Kurdish separatist party who have relied on terrorist activities to win independence for ethnic Kurds in Turkey and have thus far failed.
On the other hand the pesh merga are Kurdish fighters in Iraq who have a pro-Western leaning and have fought several battles against Saddam.
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