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Ansar al-Islam takes on the USA

By Ed Blanche

Abderrazak Mahdjoub is the man every intelligence officer in Western Europe wants to talk to these days. The 30-year-old Algerian known as 'the Sheikh' is being held by German authorities who believe he heads a continent-wide terrorist operation for Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam), an Iraqi Kurdish fundamentalist group that is rapidly becoming a major adversary of the USA and the cutting edge of the Iraqi resistance.

There is mounting evidence that Ansar al-Islam has links with Al-Qaeda and the USA believes it has been behind many of the suicide attacks against their troops in Iraq and probably the devastating twin suicide bombings in Iraqi Kurdistan on 2 February 2004 that killed more than 100 people, including key leaders of the pro-USA Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

By all accounts, Mahdjoub is providing his European interrogators with a detailed picture of a clandestine network that authorities say smuggles would-be suicide bombers to Iraq for the jihad against the occupation forces. At the same time, European governments are becoming increasingly fearful that they will become targets themselves as the terrorist networks proliferate. In December 2003, the EU police agency, Europol, warned: "The fact that no Islamic extremist attack has been committed in the EU [since October 2002] should not be considered as a diminution or an absence of threat."

On 23 October 2003, the Pentagon declared that Ansar al-Islam had become the principal 'terrorist adversary' of US forces in Iraq. Suspicions about its links to Al-Qaeda have hardened as the ferocity of suicide attacks against US and other targets in Iraq has intensified. This, Coalition intelligence believes, is the work of Ansar al-Islam.

The co-ordinated attacks in Irbil, the worst ever seen in Iraq since the war, were claimed by a group calling itself Jaish Ansar al-Sunna (Army of the Sunni Partisans), but they bore the stamp of Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam. The latter is believed to be the core of Jaish Ansar al-Sunna, which casts itself as the protector of Iraq's Sunni minority. The group is believed to have been responsible for the suicide bombing of the Turkish embassy in Baghdad on 14 October 2003, the 29 November ambush in which nine Spanish intelligence officers were killed and other such attacks, including the car bombing of a Mosul police station on 31 January 2004.

Ansar al-Islam was established after 11 September 2001 in an enclave in northeastern Iraq, near the porous border with Iran - an area outside of Saddam Hussein's control. In late March 2003, US-led forces attacked its mountain stronghold, a cluster of some 16 villages and a network of caves in the Halabja Valley. Some 200 of the 800 fighters were killed, according to the PUK. Many of those who survived fled into Iran.

After the Iraq war, the group reconstituted itself, exploiting the chaos that followed the invasion. Some Ansar al-Islam leaders, such as Abu Abdullah al-Shafei, Ayoub Afghani and Abu Wa'el, were seen in the Iranian border city of Sanandaj in June and July, regrouping their fighters and recruiting new men.