U.S., Iraq fear terror group re-emerging

BIYARA, Iraq -- Before the U.S. launched its campaign to oust Saddam Hussein, an Islamic militant group called Ansar al-Islam held this tiny Kurdish village of mud-roofed huts and wheat farmers hostage, routinely jailing villagers who violated their fundamentalist code of conduct.

U.S. and Kurdish forces routed the group from northern Iraq during the war. In recent weeks Ansar militants have returned but with a far different agenda.

Members of Ansar are sneaking over the Iranian border at night and using villages like Biyara as way stations before journeying south to Baghdad and other central Iraqi cities to engineer and execute terrorist attacks, top Kurdish security officials said this week.

The assertion has been bolstered by intelligence that Kurdish security forces recently gathered at Ansar meetings, during which the group's leaders said they will focus attacks on cities in central and southern Iraq.

"They see the environment in central and southern Iraq as much more suitable for them," said a top Kurdish security official.

Kurdish security officials have foiled at least one attempt by Ansar to assassinate a top official in northern Iraq using a car bomb, said Barham Saleh, prime minister of the northern Iraq area controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

U.S. officials say that Ansar has ties to Osama bin Laden's al- Qaida network, and the group is suspected in Tuesday's truck bomb attack that killed at least 24 at the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad this week, as well as the Aug. 7 car bombing that killed 19 at the Jordanian Embassy.

Both U.S. and Iraqi officials have grown increasingly worried about a re-emergence of Ansar inside Iraq. U.S. officials believe as many as 200 members of Ansar are now in the country.

"We think they've migrated from the north down to Baghdad and we think that they're established there," Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, said Thursday. "It's not good for us when they get established in an urban area, as you can well appreciate."

Abizaid added that terrorism in Iraq has surpassed guerrilla attacks on U.S. soldiers as "the number one security threat" to the U.S.-led effort to rebuild the country.

President Bush underscored the concern on Friday.

"Iraq is turning out to be a continuing battle in the war on terrorism," Bush said after a meeting with economic leaders in Washington state. "I also believe there is a foreign element moving into Iraq."

Roughly 50 Ansar members have been captured by Kurdish officials in northern Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq. However, U.S. and Kurdish officials believe many more have escaped and are blending into Iraqi society.

Kurdish security officials said they also have information that Ansar members have teamed with members of the Fedayeen Saddam militia and other Saddam loyalists who have been waging a guerrilla war with U.S. forces.

Though Ansar is a Kurdish group, Palestinians, Jordanians, Saudis, Tunisians and other Arabs have joined its ranks, Saleh said.

Saleh and other Kurdish officials say they believe Ansar's mission in Iraq has broadened and now resembles an al-Qaida-like crusade against Western influence in an Islamic country.

"Everyone who has a stake against the U.S., against building democracy, is coming to Iraq," Saleh said in an interview at his heavily guarded house in Sulaymaniyah. "This is the battle zone. Ansar can provide logistical support for al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations coming to Iraq.

"And they all want to derail what we hope to be a political process culminating in some form of democracy in this very important country in the Islamic Middle East."

Ansar has roots in an array of Kurdish Islamic extremist groups that melded in September 2001. Afterward, Ansar militants began assuming control over Kurdish villages at the foot of the Qandil Mountains, which separate Iran from Iraq.

Women were barred from schools and work and were forced to wear the traditional abayas that cover all parts of the body except the face. Men were flogged for drinking alcohol and jailed for smoking cigarettes.

For shaving his mustache, Saman Saleh, 24, spent three days in a darkened 3-by-8-foot cell at Ansar jail in Biyara.

"We lived in fear every day," said Saleh, who lives in nearby Tawela. "Most young people simply ran away."

Arrested on suspicion of being a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Ansar's opposition, Saryaz Mutafa Fariz was taken to the Biyara jail where Ansar members bound his hands and feet and blindfolded him. They turned him toward a wall and fired two shots just to the left of his head, then two more to the right.

"Then they put a sword to my neck and said, 'We're going to kill you,"' Fariz said. Within a day, the militants realized he was not a PUK fighter and released him.

In late March, U.S. forces bombarded Ansar's bunkers and its fortified caves with Tomahawk cruise missiles. A sweep by U.S. Special Forces and PUK fighters followed. More than 250 of Ansar's 600 militants were killed. The rest fled into the mountains and sought refuge in Iran.

Since then, many of those militants have regrouped in Iranian villages near the Iraqi border, said a Kurdish security official. When ready to attempt a border crossing, they hide in the dense woods at the foot of the Qandils by day and cross in groups of two or three at night with the help of a hired guide, said Sheik Jaafer Sheikh Mustafa, a general in the PUK's pesh merga militia.

The crossing takes two days, Mustafa said. Once in Iraq, Ansar members rely on forged identification and fraudulent passports to pass through checkpoints.

Khazim Murat, a PUK security sergeant in Biyara, said villagers reported seeing a group of 10 Ansar militants in the village two weeks ago. PUK forces captured three; the others escaped.

"They're difficult to capture because they know the region," Murat said. "And many villagers are simply afraid to speak up."

Mustafa said the PUK plans to deploy 400 more pesh merga troops along the border, but the Kurdistan section of the Iraqi-Iranian border is a 435-mile stretch of rugged terrain that is difficult to patrol. "They can get across pretty easily," he said.

Enforcement is made tougher by the fact Ansar militants crossing the border blend in with throngs of pilgrims trying to get into Iraq to visit the Islamic holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Ansar members have made it to safe houses in those cities as well - - an especially troubling development if they are able to win support from radical Shiite clerics fomenting opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Mustafa said. One cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, has attracted audiences that number in the thousands.

Saleh, the PUK prime minister, said he has tightened security in Sulaymaniyah and the rest of PUK-controlled Kurdish territory in Iraq as a result of this week's truck bombing in Baghdad and the earlier Jordanian Embassy bombing.

"The car bombs have started, and we'll see more," he said. "You cannot afford to be complacent with these guys. You are talking about a bunch of sophisticated people who are fanatics, who truly believe that they will go to heaven 10 minutes after they die.

"For them," Saleh continued, "to escape the misery of Earth in 10 minutes without visas, without airplane tickets, is quite an attractive proposition."

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