I'll offer my view, someone can tell me if I'm off base. The key here is that they were not just Arab volunteers coming to Iraq to fight, they were Arab volunteers entering Iraq by the official port of entry and being directed up to join a Kurdish unit fighting for Saddam, rather than attaching themselves to any of a number of units around Baghdad they could have joined.
Excellent analysis. I didn't see that central point, myself, until you spelt it out.
Evidence for such an development is absent from this article. I would be interested to see such a link - al-Qaida/Saddamm/al-Ansar. Until then, I must say that al-Ansar Islamia looks like an Iranian backed show. No one mentions that possibility, but it is pretty obvious. They were on the Iran border, and fled away there once the fighting started.
The presence of the no-fly zone was a big temptation for the Iranian govt to try to expand there.