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'Al Qaeda' Influence Grows in Iraq
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
(22:04 GMT) (23:04 UK)
By Jim Muir
BBC Middle East Correspondent

Abu Iman al-Baghdadi: "Some of Ansar trained in Iraq."
Image Credit: The BBC.

"The Ansar's basic allegiance is to al-Qaeda, but some of them were trained in Iraq and went to Afghanistan," al-Baghdadi said, interviewed in a Kurdish prison. "When the Americans attacked, they came here through Iran. Iraq is supporting them and using them to carry out attacks."

A pocket of militant Islamic extremists, believed to be linked to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda movement, is causing havoc in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq.

The presence of the violently anti-American group, known as the Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam), is likely to attract increasing attention as US moves to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime gather pace.

A number of Washington's regional adversaries -- including both Baghdad and Iran -- appear to have a finger in the Ansar pie.

The Ansar are largely made up of Iraqi Kurds belonging to several radical Islamic groups which merged late last year.

They control a string of villages in the plains and mountains between the town of Halabja and the mountain ridge which marks Iraq's border with Iran.

But many of the Ansar's Kurdish members are believed to have returned from Afghanistan, where they had gone for training and to wage jihad (Holy War) alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Kurdish leaders who run the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan, and who have suffered heavily at the Ansar's hands, say that at least 20 or 30 Arabs linked to al-Qaeda have also come from Afghanistan to join the Islamist pocket.

* 'Iraq's Tora Bora'
* Shadowy connections
* Iranian links
(More: BBC Online News Source)
2002 © The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Dan