Category Archives: Kurds

Mullah Krekar denies Baghdad-Al Qa’ida link

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Mul­lah Krekar, the spir­i­tual leader of the Islamic insur­gent group Ansar al-Islam, oper­at­ing near the Iran­ian bor­der in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, has denied that his group is a link between Bagh­dad and the al Qa’ida ter­ror group.
“I never had links with Sad­dam Hussein’s fam­ily, Sad­dam Hussein’s gov­ern­ment, Sad­dam Hussein’s party, not in the past, not now, not in the future, and not inside Iraq or out­side, not directly, not indi­rectly,” he told the BBC in Nor­way after he spent four months in a Dutch jail. “As a Kur­dish man, I believe that he is our enemy, and as an Ortho­dox Mus­lim also, I believe that Sad­dam Hus­sein and his group are out­side of Islam’s zone.“
He also repeated past denials that Ansar has ties to al Qa’ida. This is almost assuredly a lie. The var­i­ous Islamist par­ties are a desta­bi­liz­ing force in the PUK region of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Used to be, there was only one party, called the Islamic Move­ment, with its leader, Ali Abdul Aziz. But about three years ago, a splin­ter group, led by Ali Baper, broke off to form the Islamic Asso­ci­a­tion of Kur­dis­tan. Now, both the Islamic Asso­ci­a­tion and the Islamic Move­ment had their own pesh­mer­gas with the Islamic Move­ment hav­ing a spe­cial force of fight­ers called “Suran Force” under the influ­ence of Abu Baker al Tawhed. (Al Tawhed came to Kur­dis­tan in 1988, soon after the Hal­abja mas­sacre, by way of Afghanistan.)
Thrown into all this mix was an inde­pen­dent group of fight­ers led by Krekar, a Nor­we­gian Mus­lim. Krekar’s boys teamed up with al Tawhed’s Suran Force to form a group of assas­sins. Many offi­cials in the Kur­dish enclave believe
Suran Force, with Krekar’s fight­ers, killed Franso Hariri, father of Fowzi Hariri of the KDP, in Feb­ru­ary 2001. The assas­si­na­tion was a trig­ger and one week after the killing, Al Tawhed’s group split with the Islamic Move­ment and formed Jund al Islam (“Sol­diers of Islam.”)
So you now had the Islamic Move­ment, led by Aziz, the Islamic Asso­ci­a­tion, led by Baper and Jund al Islam, led by Tawhed. Krekar was run­ning around as a wild card. Nat­u­rally, all these groups pre­pared to kill each other in the Iran­ian bor­der regions around Hal­abja. Alarmed at the thought a minia­ture civil war in its ter­ri­tory, the PUK sent a small mil­i­tary force to the region to keep order. But Jund al Islam didn’t take kindly to the PUK’s inter­fer­ence with what they saw their region, so they claimed the PUK was un-Islamic since it was fight­ing fel­low Mus­lims. In Octo­ber 2001, they attacked a group of PUK sol­diers in a small vil­lage called Kheli Hama out­side of Hal­abja and cap­tured 42 fight­ers. They marched them to the vil­lage cen­ter where they first shot them in the head and then decap­i­tated them.
After a month of fight­ing the PUK, Jund al Islam joined for­mally with Krekar’s fight­ers to form Ansar al Islam (“Sup­port­ers of Islam.”) Krekar has the deep­est ties with Osama bin Laden’s al Qa’ida group. He claims to have fought in Afghanistan, Chech­nya and Kosovo, and in an inter­view with a Nor­we­gian mag­a­zine, Krekar as much admit­ted to being a mem­ber of al Qa’ida.
All that said, the fact that an al Qa’ida cell is oper­at­ing in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, get­ting back­ing from both bin Laden and Sad­dam, does not log­i­cally lead to the charge that Sad­dam is linked with bin Laden. The White House’s rea­son­ing seems to go thusly: Al Qa’ida backs Ansar al-Islam. Sad­dam backs Ansar al-Islam. Thus, Sad­dam and al Qa’ida are linked and work together.
While it may be true that Iraq and al Qa’ida are linked, this is not the argu­ment that makes the con­nec­tion. I talked about this here. Think of it this way: The Soviet Union sup­ported some muja­hadin groups while they were in Afghanistan. The United States sup­ported some of the same groups. Ergo, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the 1980s. See my point?
Look, I’m not say­ing Sad­dam isn’t a wicked man and that war is never jus­ti­fied. Some­times it is. The Amer­i­can cam­paign in Afghanistan was a just war and I sup­ported it. (I even — briefly — con­sid­ered enlist­ing until I remem­bered I have a prob­lem with author­ity.) I can imag­ine sce­nar­ios in which I would sup­port an inva­sion of Iraq (build­ing democ­racy and lib­er­at­ing the Kurds and Shi’ites, for exam­ple.) But the White House’s drive for war with Iraq is the wrong time and the wrong enemy. Many around the world don’t trust the moti­va­tions of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, which too often asks Amer­ica to judge it by its inten­tions not by its actions. Many don’t trust Team Bush to do any­thing sub­stan­tial to help the Kurds or other Iraqis, and I don’t think the Kurds do either. (Which is why the Kurds, while gun­ning for a show­down with Sad­dam, are deeply sus­pi­cious of Amer­i­can inten­tions.)
Look for the White House to really start play­ing up the Ansar angle, and remem­ber, it might not be true.

Al Qa’ida in Iraq? Safire says so…

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Map cour­tesy of the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Monitor

As the world looks to the United Nations today, where Hans Blix will deliver his “no smok­ing gun, we need more time” report on Iraq’s weapons pro­gram, William Safire, in today’s New York Times, tries once again to link Iraq and al Qa’ida by point­ing to the 600 Ansar al-Islam fight­ers based in the far south­east part of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. But what he neglects to men­tion is that Ansar is oper­at­ing in an region under which Sad­dam doesn’t have con­trol — hardly a “haven” since the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan is cur­rently at war with the insur­gents.
No doubt Sad­dam is pro­vid­ing fund­ing to the group in an effort to desta­bilze Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. But other coun­tries are fund­ing the group, includ­ing Iran and Turkey. The Kurds real­ize that their neigh­bors have no inter­est in see­ing an inde­pen­dent Kur­dis­tan and will sup­port any group that might thwart those ambi­tions.
The Kurds, among which Safire appar­ently has sources, have been try­ing to con­vince any­one who will lis­ten that Ansar is affil­i­ated with al Qai’da. While I inter­viewed him last sum­mer, Faraidoon Abdul Qisadir, the PUK Min­is­ter of the Inte­rior, showed me a note — in Kur­dish or Ara­bic, I’m not sure — that he said proved the group was get­ting fund­ing from Bagh­dad. He wouldn’t let me make a copy of the note so I could get it inde­pen­dently trans­lated, how­ever, so there’s no way I could have ver­i­fied its con­tent.
(Also dur­ing the meet­ing, an aide brought him another note that he said a car bomb, likely headed for my hotel, exploded on a hill out­side Suleimaniya. Again, I was unable to ver­ify this, but I did see a smoke plume ris­ing from a hill out­side the city after the inter­view. I had been in Hal­abja, near Ansar ter­ri­tory, just the day before and Qisadir spec­u­lated that Ansar agents had seen me. Who knows?)
Safire has tried this link­age before, with his asser­tions — since dis­proved by Czech author­i­ties — that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Safire has never admit­ted this error.
Look, there is lit­tle doubt that Ansar has ties to al Qa’ida. And there is lit­tle doubt they are get­ting fund­ing and weapons from Sad­dam. At the same time, how­ever, because they are oper­at­ing in an area that has been freed of Baghdad’s influ­ence I find it hard to believe that they are oper­at­ing with Saddam’s “bless­ing.” More likely, Tehran is help­ing them more than Bagh­dad is, and the Iraqi pres­i­dent is tak­ing advan­tage of their pres­ence to keep the Kurds off bal­ance. Get­ting money from both Sad­dam and al Qa’ida does not log­i­cally lead to a link­age between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. Ansar wants to destroy the Kur­dish sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment and set up an Islamic state under shar’ia, the harsh Islamic law of the Tal­iban. Bagh­dad, how­ever, is a sec­u­lar gang­ster regime. If Ansar were ever to gain con­trol of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — an impos­si­ble dream for the insur­gents — Bagh­dad would imme­di­ately launch a cam­paign to crush the Islamists, who have no inten­tion of co-existing peace­fully with Sad­dam. I might add, too, that if the above sce­nario were to come to pass, the United States would be glad to see Sad­dam wipe them out.
Sad­dam is help­ing Ansar because of the old Ara­bic say­ing, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Were Ansar in power in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, the United States would rightly see them as an enemy. And you can imag­ine a set of very inter­est­ing allies.

Of course, you know, this means war

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Photo cour­tesy of the BBC

First off, my apolo­gies for the delay in updat­ing the site. This past week, I got snowed under by a com­bi­na­tion of out­side assign­ments and a mater­nal visit. I’m not a slacker. Really. Also, to who­ever just donated $5, thanks very much! You pushed me over the $100 mark for dona­tions.
Oddly enough, it’s been a bit of a quiet week on the Iraqi front, with any news mostly pushed to the side by Trent Lott wink­ing at the seg­re­ga­tion­ists and then say­ing, in effect, “I wasn’t wink­ing, I had some­thing in my eye.” As they say in the movies, “It’s quiet … too quiet.“
But the war machine moves on, although per­haps with more hes­i­ta­tion than many peo­ple think. Chief of the Army, Gen. Eric Shin­seki, and the com­man­dant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James L. Jones, worry that the cur­rent war plans are too risky. The plans, as reported by the Wash­ing­ton Post call for “a fast-moving ground attack with­out an over­whelm­ing num­ber of rein­force­ments on hand.” Instead, the war would get off to a “rolling start” with more troops being flown in. Also, the armored units, instead of trav­el­ing a pre­de­ter­mined dis­tance and paus­ing to allow slower units to catch up, would charge across the desert until they run into oppo­si­tion. They would then blow things up real good.
That’s the cur­rent plan, any­way, and it’s giv­ing Shin­seki and Jones, who sit on the Joint Chiefs, the heebie-jeebies. They argue that Paul Wolfowitz’s rosy “house of cards” the­ory of the life span of Saddam’s reign is overly opti­mistic. The gen­er­als argue that worst-case plan­ning is nec­es­sary, espe­cially in the case of a “Fortress Bagh­dad” sce­nario that involves heavy street fight­ing with the Iraqis using chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal agents. (Hm. Have Shin­seki and Jones been read­ing this entry in which the Ba’ath party has a con­tin­gency plan to ring Bagh­dad with the Repub­li­can Guard? The details of the Iraqi defense plan, first reported in the London-based Ara­bic daily paper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi are thus:

“First, deploy­ment of the Repub­li­can Guard forces at the periph­ery of the cities, pri­mar­ily Bagh­dad, to resist any Amer­i­can ground offen­sive that seeks to take them. The mis­sion of the Repub­li­can [Guard] forces will also be to resist any attempt at inter­nal Iraqi rebel­lion, such as the one that fol­lowed the Amer­i­can offen­sive in Jan­u­ary 1991 in the South and the North.“
“Sec­ond, deploy­ment of spe­cial forces that will include the ‘elite of the elite’ – in his words – inside the cap­i­tal Bagh­dad, so that they can par­tic­i­pate in street com­bat if the Amer­i­can forces or their allies enter. Then, will begin fierce resis­tance oper­a­tions, such as those car­ried out in occu­pied Pales­tine.“
“Third, deploy­ment of groups of ‘Saddam’s Feday­een’ within the cap­i­tal and in other cities, to con­trol the inter­nal sit­u­a­tion and par­tic­i­pate in the resis­tance oper­a­tions.” (Trans­la­tion pro­vided cour­tesy of MEMRI)

The “good” news, I guess, is that if it does come down to hor­ri­ble fight­ing, block by city block, and Sad­dam strikes back with chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal weapons, a major­ity of Amer­i­cas are fully pre­pared to nuke him.
Six in 10 Amer­i­cans would sup­port a nuclear response, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post-ABC News poll. Yipes! More encour­ag­ingly, how­ever, 58 per­cent of respon­dents said Pres­i­dent George W. Bush had not pre­sented enough evi­dence to war­rant attack­ing Iraq, up from 50 per­cent in Sep­tem­ber. There seems to be some con­cern over Bush’s motives for attack­ing Iraq and the pub­lic wor­ries he’s mov­ing too quickly for their taste. Fifty-eight per­cent also want to see the United Nations as a sup­port­ing cast mem­ber. Per­haps in the Gulf War II movie, it will be cred­ited as “sec­ond inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion on the left.“
(As an aside, U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell told Al-Quds Al-Arabi that the United States had no plans to remove Sad­dam from power. “If he coop­er­ates, then the basis of changed-regime pol­icy has shifted because his regime has, in fact, changed its pol­icy to one of coop­er­a­tion,” Pow­ell said. Note it’s no longer “regime change” but “changed regime” as the goal. Orwell must be proud.)
Oh, and in case any­one thought a war might be averted, the United States will give Iraq’s dossier it turned in last week­end an “F.” With the news that the United States would not be accept­ing Iraq’s excuse that the dog ate its chem­i­cal weapons, the price of gold rose and the dol­lar fell, indi­cat­ing that mar­kets feel war is now inevitable. I’ve been say­ing it since July: It’s not a mat­ter of will the United States go to war, but when. And it’s still look­ing like Feb­ru­ary or March. Strat­for agrees, say­ing that Aus­tralia has been advised to be ready to gear up in March. The British mil­i­tary has also begun leak­ing to the press say­ing the sum­mer heat would not be a “cru­cial fac­tor” in an attack on Iraq.
In other news, the Asso­ci­ated Press is now report­ing that Turkey is prepar­ing to deploy 65,000 to 75,000 troops in north­ern Iraq in the event of a U.S. inva­sion. I reported on this back in Octo­ber. Radio Aus­tralia is report­ing that Turkey has already put 10,000 to 15,000 troops on the Turkish-Iraqi bor­der in order to counter Kur­dish rebels oper­at­ing cross bor­der. The goal of the Turks is to pre­vent the Kurds from form­ing a state in the fog of war result­ing from a dust-up to the south. The Turks would also be in a posi­tion to seize the oil fields of Kirkuk and Mosul, some­thing they’ve wanted to do since 1923 when they were denied to Ataturk. Ankara is not going to miss out on the spoils of this war, espe­cially since the first one and the decade of sanc­tions demol­ished Turkey’s econ­omy. It’s pay­back time.

Kurdish rebels armed on Turkish-Iraq border

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Jane’s Defense Weekly reported (sorry, no link) last month that the Kur­dis­tan Free­dom and Democ­racy Con­gress (KADEK), the suc­ces­sor to the Kur­dish Work­ers’ Party (PKK), has armed itself with man-portable surface-to-air (SAM) mis­siles along the Turkish-Iraqi bor­der. The news, leaked by the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to the national press, under­scores the Kur­dish rebels’ con­cerns that Turkey may be plan­ning an inva­sion of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan in con­junc­tion with a U.S.-Iraq war.
Accord­ing to the report, KADEK has acquired 70 to 80 Strela-2 mis­siles, and is look­ing to pro­cure more. (These are labeled by NATO as the SA-7 “Grail”.) The arms are posi­tioned in the Harkuk and Kandil moun­tains in north­ern Iraq, and the group is look­ing to fur­ther deploy the mis­siles in the Haf­tanin and Garadag moun­tains. KADEK is also report­edly seek­ing mines and other ordi­nance to be deployed along the bor­der with Turkey’s Sir­nak province. Fight­ers have been repo­si­tioned to the evac­u­ated vil­lages of Haf­tanin, Metine, Zap, Avasin-Basyan and Harkuk in North­ern Iraq. These weapons would pose a seri­ous threat to Turk­ish armed forces oper­at­ing in the region.
The weapons, worth about $200,000, have been acquired from Arme­nia, Iran and Iraq in the last cou­ple of months. Most of the arms are Russ­ian made.

Victims of Arabization

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Wahab Mashoor Muham­mad and his sons © 2002 Christo­pher Allbritton

BINISLAWA DISPLACED PERSONS CAMP, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — The day is hot, damn hot. It’s the mid­dle of July, and the air is dry and thirsty with the ther­mome­ter bump­ing against the 45 degree Cel­sius mark. Lit­tle dust dev­ils curl up around my heels as I walk. Yet inside a tent that 11 peo­ple call home, the water is cold and refresh­ing and the hos­pi­tal­ity is gen­uine.
Abdul­lah Salam, my guide from the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party, and I have come here to Bin­is­lawa where thou­sands of tent homes are set up and tens of thou­sands of peo­ple wait for relief from … some­one. As we approach one tent, Wahab Mashoor Muham­mad, 49, greets us and wel­comes us into his home.
It’s not much, to be hon­est. The floor is poured con­crete and the walls are cin­derblocks packed with mud to hold them in place. Poles sup­port the can­vas “roof” which is all that pro­tects them from the winds and the cold of win­ter. There is no heat or run­ning water. But it’s clean, and Wahab’s wife and daugh­ters arrange pil­lows for us to sit on. Another daugh­ter brings me a glass of water from a plas­tic cooler.
He’s been here since July 18, 2001, almost a year to the day that I visit. He’s from Kaz­na­far, a vil­lage out­side Kirkuk, the largest Kur­dish city in Iraq, where he was a taxi dri­ver. He was forced to leave his home with a few blan­kets, some kitchen items and his fam­ily when he refused to change his nation­al­ity from Kur­dish to Arab under a pro­gram called “Ara­biza­tion” that Sad­dam Hussein’s regime has been engag­ing in since the 1970s. In other parts of the world, it would be called eth­nic cleans­ing.
“I’m a Kurd,” he says. “How can I be an Arab or change my nation­al­ity? It’s wrong for a man to deny his nation­al­ity.“
Ara­biza­tion has been going on since the 1920s, ever since the King­dom of Iraq was cre­ated out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire by the United King­dom. But it was inten­si­fied after 1975 after the Alger­ian Agree­ment between Iran and Iraq, under which the Shah cut his sup­port for Kur­dish rebels in Iraq. Kurds are forcibly evicted from their homes in Kirkuk, Mosul and other oil-rich regions of north­ern Iraq unless they agree to have their reg­is­tered nation­al­ity changed to Arab. If they refuse, which many do, they are expelled from their homes, usu­ally with only a few hours to gather their pos­ses­sions and turned north, to the Kur­dish enclave in the north. Arab fam­i­lies are lured from the south to the vacant Kur­dish homes in the north with money, land and pickup trucks, all con­fis­cated from the dis­placed Kurds. It is esti­mated that more than 8,000 fam­i­lies live in Bin­is­lawa. That’s more than 50,000 peo­ple.
NATO went to war in 1998 – 99 in Kosovo and Yugoslavia to pre­vent this kind of stuff.
But chang­ing his eth­nic­ity isn’t all Wahab was expected to do. The Iraqis demanded he join the elite Jerusalem Brigade, which now holds posi­tions about 20 km out­side of Arbil. So named because Sad­dam has said this fight­ing force will be the one to lib­er­ate Jerusalem from the Jews, the Kurds say that the road to Jerusalem runs through Kur­dis­tan. Wahab was being told he must be pre­pared to make war on his own peo­ple.
Since he refused all this, he was expelled, along with his wife, his mother and his eight chil­dren. Now they all live in a tent, and they might be con­sid­ered the lucky ones.

  • In 1983, 8,000 Kurds were “dis­ap­peared” by the Iraqi regime.
  • In 1987 – 88, 180,000 peo­ple dis­ap­peared or were exe­cuted under the Anfal Cam­paign. “Anfal” is a prin­ci­ple from the Koran and it allows the loot­ing of a non-Muslim pop­u­la­tion when Mus­lims con­quer them.
  • In 1988, Hal­abja became a night­mare when Sad­dam used chem­i­cal weapons against women and chil­dren, killing 5,000 peo­ple in about 15 min­utes. More than 10,000 peo­ple were injured and the region suf­fers from lin­ger­ing health prob­lems. In all, more than 200 vil­lages were gassed and no one is sure how many peo­ple died. There have been no stud­ies on the after-effects of the chem­i­cals on the pop­u­la­tion or the environment.

So, Wahab is under­stand­ably anx­ious to see Sad­dam go. “If Sad­dam is over­thrown, I would run back to Kirkuk!” says Wahab. “My fam­ily has been liv­ing there for 300 years.“
He may get his wish come February.