January 13, 2003
Kurds Face a Second Enemy: Islamic Fighters on Iraq Flank
By C. J. CHIVERS
HINERWE MOUNTAIN, Iraq, Jan. 12 — Peering down from this snowcapped peak, Khakamend Khakarush Omar, a Kurdish military commander who has spent his life resisting Saddam Hussein, pointed to villages in the valley below. All are under enemy control, ringed by bunkers and armed bearded men.
The enemy gunmen on the opposing ridge are not in Mr. Hussein's army. They pay no allegiance to any state. They are fighters for Ansar al Islam, a group of militants who have taken hold of a small corner of Kurdish-controlled Iraq and established harsh Islamic order over a wild, isolated land.
On this side of the lines, the secular Kurdish government rules. On the other, women must wear veils and men must wear beards. Music, alcohol, television and dancing are banned. Ansar's defectors say that men must assemble in mosques for prayer five times each day and that shops cannot display products with labels bearing images of women.
"They have the same program as the Taliban here," Mr. Omar said, crouching behind a wall while distant gunfire echoed on the other side.
It is a tense time. As Kurds wait for a decision on whether the United States will attack their primary enemy, Mr. Hussein, they are bogged down in a war on their flank. It is a war against militant Islam, with strong parallels and ties to the war in Afghanistan, albeit on a much smaller scale.
It is also a war with significant implications for America's own plans for Iraq. After Ansar forces overran two hilltops at the valley's entrance last month, killing scores in battle and executing nearly two dozen captured Kurdish fighters, the Kurdish authorities here formally requested American help.
The request might not have been necessary. American officials say the Pentagon is concerned that in addition to general threats posed by the spread of international Islamic terrorism, Ansar al Islam — estimated to have more than 600 troops or militants — would pose risks to American forces during a war against Mr. Hussein, or during an occupation afterward.
An American official who has interviewed captured Islamists near here said a central element of what the Kurdish government here has been saying for a year — that Ansar has directly collaborated with Al Qaeda — was now believed to be true. This claim is also confirmed by Al Qaeda documents found in Afghanistan by The New York Times.
"I take it as a given that, yes, some of these Ansar people have strong links to Afghanistan, and strong links to Al Qaeda," the official said.
Signs of that thinking were evident recently when an American intelligence team visited the Kurdish military headquarters along the Ansar lines. The team later observed Ansar positions from Kurdish bunkers and returned to the headquarters to meet with a Kurdish commander and intelligence chief.
In the valley beneath Shinerwe Mountain, there is a sense that this small war is soon to grow.
It is a possibility anticipated by the Islamists as well. One imprisoned militant, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, who was arrested last April after an assassination attempt against the prime minister in the eastern Kurdish zone, said Ansar's fighters had long expected the United States to intervene. "The simplest person there, the smallest person, knows that America may attack," he said.
Still, even as the expectation builds, much of the fine detail about Ansar — whose ranks include local teenagers, Taliban copycats and Qaeda escapees who regrouped here from Afghanistan — remains murky.
With its back to the Iranian border and its front facing a quasi-democracy in Kurdish Iraq that the world barely recognizes, the group operates in deep geographic and political isolation. Villages under its control are nearly impenetrable to outsiders. Unlike the Taliban before it was defeated, Ansar does not admit foreign journalists.
But in nearly 40 hours of interviews with Ansar prisoners and defectors in Kurdish custody, combined with interviews of two dozen Kurdish soldiers who fight them and with Kurdish and Western officials who have analyzed the group, as well as a review of some of Ansar's own video footage, a picture emerges of a group modeled after the Taliban, sponsoring war and terror from territory it rules with a deeply conservative religious bent.
Ansar al Islam, whose name means Supporters of Islam, formed in 2001 when several splintered parties in the region, which had been sending envoys to meet with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, merged into one and joined the international jihad.
The group operates on several levels. It runs training camps with lessons on infantry weapons, tactics, suicide bombing and assassination. It videotapes combat operations and has boasted of battlefield successes on a Web site (www.ansarislam.com). It sends video copies on compact discs to Al Qaeda at an undisclosed location, a defector said.
The disc images, some of which were reviewed by The Times, include scenes from the battle in December and its aftermath, in which Ansar fighters lined up dead Kurdish fighters along a road. The cameraman, walking along filming this macabre display, zooms in on several of the dead fighters' heads, each with bullet wounds that suggest execution. Parts of the footage are overlaid with music and Islamic chants.
Local officials and prisoners say that the group is also host to Arab fighters who left Afghanistan as the United States routed the Taliban, and that those fighters have used this largely lawless border region much as Al Qaeda members have hidden in the Pakistani frontier. Kurdish intelligence officials say as many as 150 foreign fighters are in Ansar's ranks, although some estimates put that number as low as 30.
The group is thought to have about 650 fighters in all, including Kurds who have trained in Afghanistan. Its 15-member leadership council, or shura, which operates from the village of Beyara, includes several people who served as emissaries to Al Qaeda, visiting Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001, Kurdish officials and Ansar defectors said.
According to those people, the leaders include Mullah Namo and Omar Barziani, two Kurds who met with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; Abu Zubair al-Shami, an Arab who was sent last year as Osama bin Laden's representative to expand Al Qaeda; and Ayub Afghan, a Kurdish explosives specialist who fought alongside Afghans against the Russians and now makes suicide bomber's belts and teaches at Ansar's camps.
Some Kurdish officials say this region was infiltrated by Al Qaeda in 2001 to set up an alternative to the group's Afghanistan headquarters. "Beyara is the command center of the Middle East," said Nisherwan Mustafa Amin, a senior member of the Kurdish politburo in northeastern Iraq. This claim has not been publicly endorsed by Washington.
Documents from a Qaeda guest house in Kabul, gathered by a Times reporter as the Taliban were being defeated in Afghanistan, also establish a connection between the Islamists in this valley and Al Qaeda's international jihad.
The documents, which were found with bomb manuals and Al Qaeda ammunition inventories, include lists of pseudonyms for international volunteers whom Al Qaeda referred for training in Afghan camps. Among them are five Kurds.
They also include a memorandum from the "Iraqi Kurdistan Islamic Brigade" listing several Iraqi villages beneath the Shinerwe Mountain's ridges, including Beyara, and declaring that the Islamists should be urged to unite and apply the Taliban's style of civic order there. [The text of the memorandum is linked at the right under the "Related Articles" header.]
"Expel those Jews and Christians from Kurdistan, and join the way of jihad," it reads. "Rule every piece of land you rule with the Islamic sharia rule."
The memorandum was dated Aug. 11, 2001, three weeks before formerly independent Islamic parties in the region announced that they had formed the party that became Ansar, and shortly before mullahs began circulating new Islamic rules.
It was also just weeks before the militants opened an offensive against the secular Kurdish forces. A senior Qaeda leader from Afghanistan, Abdulrakhman al-Shami, was killed early in the campaign, according to Kurdish officials and a defector who attended his funeral.
Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party controlling most of northeastern Iraq, said Ansar might harbor more senior Qaeda members as well.
"The last analysis of the Americans is that this group is part of Al Qaeda, and some of the leaders, some of the very important members of Al Qaeda, are now in the area," he said.
In the strongest public allegation to date, Ali Abu al-Ragheb, Jordan's prime minister, said last month that Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, a senior Qaeda leader, was believed to be hiding in Ansar's camps. Mr. Zarqawi is accused of ordering and underwriting the assassination in October of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat in Jordan.
Kurdish intelligence officials believe that he uses the name Kudama while in northern Iraq, and that with Mr. Khadir, who was captured, he planned the nearly successful attempt last April to kill Dr. Barham Salih, the prime minister of the eastern Kurdish zone.
Other aspects of Ansar's activities are more uncertain. Kurdish officials suggested last year that the Islamists were smuggling chemical weapons from Iraq's security services to Al Qaeda. The American official who interviewed prisoners here said the claim did not seem credible.
Nonetheless, neither American nor local officials rule out the chance that Mr. Hussein's security services and the militants have exchanged information about the Kurds, an enemy they share.
There is similar uncertainty about a link to Iran. Iran has denied supporting Ansar, and two months ago, Mr. Amin said, the Iranian government notified the Kurds that it had cut ties with the militants and that it regards them as terrorists.
But Kurdish officials say Iran has encouraged Ansar, helping it to destabilize the secular authorities in the Kurdish enclave. They note that ammunition smuggled to Beyara, which is beside the border, has come through Iran.
"For the amount of mortars Ansar shells us with each month, they would need six or seven trucks to carry it," an intelligence official said. "Iran is lying when they say, `It's not us.' "
One Ansar prisoner also said he knew of three wounded militants who were evacuated to Iran. The prisoner, Sirwan Abdulkarim Raza, was 15 when caught.
Kurdish commanders say that despite itssupport, Ansar is vulnerable and that defections or departures have been increasing, with as many as three fighters leaving each week. One commander, Harim Kemal Agha, astride a garrison Ansar had briefly overrun last month, predicted an end. "What you are going to see here is better than what the world saw in Afghanistan," he said.
Balling his hands into fists, he snapped all of his fingers open at once. He needed no translator. He uttered a universal word: "Boom."
