Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdistan
PUK officials have repeatedly accused Ansar al-Islam of having links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, and that its members included Arabs of various nationalities who had received military training in Afghanistan. The PUK also said some fifty-seven "Arab Afghan" fighters had entered Iraqi Kurdistan via Iran in mid-September 2001. While Human Rights Watch did not investigate these alleged links, the testimonies of villagers who had fled Biyara and Tawela and were interviewed in September 2002 appeared to support this contention.
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On December 4, 2002, a group of Ansar al-Islam fighters attacked two PUK posts near Halabja, briefly seizing control of them. PUK officials claimed that about half of the fifty PUK casualties had been killed after they had surrendered or been captured. Some surviving PUK fighters gave eyewitness accounts of executions of captured PUK fighters by Ansar al-Islam to international journalists.