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TUWELLA,
Iraq -- A dirt track winds from this Kurdish border
outpost to the top of a jagged mountain ridge
separating Iran from Iraq's northern Kurdish
enclave.
For years, and with the blessing of Iranian
officials, Islamist terrorist groups have smuggled
weapons and money into Iraq on this road, many
Kurdish intelligence and security officials said.
When US special forces and Kurdish peshmerga
fighters attacked Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda
affiliate, in March 2003, hundreds of its members
fled to Iran, the officials said, and have regrouped
in several towns just over this border.
There, they continue to train, raise funds, and plan
terrorist operations in Iraq, infiltrating
operatives across a porous, rocky, high-altitude
border that has long been a haven for smugglers and
that, in practical terms, is impossible to police,
the Kurdish officials say.
Iraqi and US officials have grumbled for more than a
year about what they perceive as Iranian
interference in Iraq. Iran has repeatedly and
forcefully denied any such interference.
But here in the mountains of Kurdistan, the Kurdish
officials point to what they say are tangible
footprints of Iran's collaboration with terror and
insurgent groups responsible for attacks inside
Iraq.
According to a half-dozen officials in the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, known as the PUK, which controls
the southern half of the Kurdistan region of Iraq,
and commanders in the peshmerga, the force that
provides security in the region, Iran has extended
its network of agents inside Iraq.
Iran, the officials say, continues to aid groups
like Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's
group, now named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Even though Iran is a Shi'ite theocracy, these
officials said, it helps Sunni insurgent groups
because it wants to prevent a strong unified
government from taking shape in Iraq.
"They go back and forth after running missions
here," said Anwar Haji Othman, head of security in
the area around Halabja, including a long stretch of
the Iranian border. "They bring cash from Iran to
Iraq across the border."
Iran denies supporting Iraqi insurgents, and has
declared its support for a peaceful, democratic
Iraq. Tehran has argued that an unstable, violent
neighbor would undermine Iran's security.
Iraqi and Iranian officials have met repeatedly, and
have pledged to work closely on security matters.
At Iraq's request, Iran stopped tens of thousands of
Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims who were flooding across
the border to visit Iraq's shrine cities -- and
bringing with them crime, infiltrators, and drug
dealers, some Iraqi officials say.
Tensions have flared publicly. This summer, in
widely repeated comments, the Iraqi defense
minister, Hazem Shaalan, called Iran his country's
"first enemy," and said Tehran's policies had "added
fuel to the fire."
American officials have warned Iran against
interfering in its neighbors affairs, but have sent
mixed signals about whether they believe Iran's
government is helping insurgents. Many top
officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell,
have called Iran's activities unhelpful, but General
John Abizaid emphasized in April that "there are
elements within Iran that are urging patience."
Tehran has said it does not allow militants to cross
the border, but Iranian officials have not ruled out
that Islamic fighters might be moving illegally from
Iran to Iraq.
Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said at the
time: "From the outset, Iran has tried to help Iraq
overcome its problems."
But Othman, the Kurdish regional security chief,
said that despite impressive internal security
forces, Iran has not stopped terror groups from
living and training just across the border in a
group of Iranian Kurdish cities.
Othman said that Kurdish forces had arrested many
members of Ansar al-Islam, including three top
leaders over the last six months. Ansar al-Islam
operated for two years in a cluster of villages
between Halabja and Tuwella. The US government
identified Ansar as a terrorist group, and believes
it sheltered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for two months
before the US invasion in 2003.
According to Othman and other intelligence
officials, Ansar's members have reconstituted as a
new group, Ansar al-Sunni, or have joined Zarqawi.
US officials have made the same claim.
According to information gleaned from questioning of
the arrested Ansar members, Othman said, former
Ansar fighters are now based in the Iranian border
towns of Marivan (home to about 60 Kurdish
Islamists), Sanandaj, Dezli (where about 30 Iranian
villagers have joined the Islamist cause) and
Orumiyeh (the base for up to 300 Islamists,
including Gulf Arabs, Afghans and Kurds). They have
a training camp in Dolanau, just a few kilometers
from the Iraqi border. Three other leading officials
have confirmed this.
"Iran continues its relationship with Ansar," Othman
said. "They are training them how to use explosive
ordnance for terrorist attacks in the south of
Iraq."
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan controls the half
of the region that includes the major cities of
Suleimaniya and Halabja, where three powerful groups
held territory from 2001 to 2003.
Its security and intelligence arm, the Asaish, has
offices across Iraq, including Mosul, Baghdad, and
Baquba, and has sources in centers including
Fallujah, said the agency's leader, Dana Ahmed Majid.
The Asaish has operated as an independent agency for
more than a decade, and has worked closely with US
intelligence.
Mohammed Mohammed Saeed, a peshmerga commander and
the top PUK official in the region around Halabja,
said that Iran regularly sends intelligence agents
into Kurdistan to monitor the Kurdish peshmerga and
the movements of Americans.
Iran used to have offices in Suleimaniya and Halabja
until US special forces landed in the region in
March 2003. But, Saeed said, the Iranians have
retained their spy network inside Iraq, and are now
using it to watch American forces and to help
insurgents.
"The Iranians are worried," he said. "They don't
want a pro-American government in Iraq. The Iranians
want neighboring countries to be full of anarchy,
violence, and chaos."
When Iran still operated openly in Kurdistan, Saeed
said, locals bribed Iranian officials with
television sets to get visas. The PUK, he said, paid
the Iranians to restrain the Islamist forces that
controlled the valley stretching from Halabja to
Iran. There, one group, Komala, or the Islamic
Group, led by Ali Bapir, controlled the town of
Khurmal. Ansar al-Islam controlled Biyara, and a
third allied group, called the Islamic Movement,
held Tuwella.
One Kurdish official in Tuwella, named Tahir Mustafa
Ali, said the three groups should be viewed as
"three wings of the same bird." Ali added that the
terror groups responsible for much of the killing,
hostage-taking, and bombing in Iraq, despite their
different names, should similarly be viewed as part
of a single network.
Iran has deep ties with many of the Iraqis who
suffered under Saddam Hussein's leadership. They
sheltered Kurds when Hussein attacked them with
chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and in the south
they sheltered Shi'ites who were fleeing retribution
for the 1991 uprising.
And the Kurds and Shi'ites, among others, who have
not secured their future in a post-Hussein Iraq,
hesitate to repudiate their erstwhile ally to the
west.
"They have been a friend to us," Saeed said. "We do
not want to have any problem with Iran."
Daily, about 50 truckloads of legal imports stream
into Iraq through this tiny border crossing above
Tuwella, carrying cement and soft drinks. The
illegal trade is just as important; Iraqi smugglers
openly drive by the Iranian checkpoint and, farther
down a dirt track, carry goods across the border on
foot or by donkey.
At the border post last week, Iranian soldiers --
under the watchful eye of a Revolutionary Guard
officer -- refused to speak to a reporter. "The
intelligence will punish us if we talk to you," one
said with a smile.
Down the dirt track, in the town of Tuwella, the
local PUK chief, Ismail Ameen, said he kept his PUK
membership a secret during the two years that
Islamists ruled Tuwella. Just before the war, in
February 2003, he saw six gray Toyota Landcruisers
drive into town from the Iranian border. He said the
trucks were loaded with bullets and mortar shells
for Islamic Movement fighters.
"They would have run out of ammunition . . . without
the supplies they got from Iran," he said.
Two top PUK security officials, and three members of
the PUK's political bureau, also contended that Iran
has continued to support Islamist insurgents.
Majid, head of the PUK's security agency, said that
one former Ansar leader, Omar Baziani, had been
caught by US forces in Baghdad six months earlier.
Through interrogations, authorities heard that
Baziani had crossed the border from Iran, Majid
said, and had met with Zarqawi in Fallujah.
"It's easy to cross the Iranian border," Majid said.
He added that the presence of Islamist terrorists in
Iran, and their apparent ease in moving between the
two countries, did not prove that Iran was
sponsoring the groups.
According to the Kurdish officials, four former
Ansar leaders have been arrested in Baghdad, Kirkuk,
and the border town of Penjwin in the past six
months. All four are believed to have been planning
or supervising attacks.
There's a long history in the area of nations giving
shelter to their enemies' enemies.
In Iraq, Hussein funded the cult-like Iranian
opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalk.
In Iran, shelter was given to an array of Iraqi
opposition groups, ranging from those considered
allied with Tehran's ideology, like the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to the
secular Iraqi National Congress.
The apparent Iranian ties to mujahedeen groups
operating inside Iraq only continues this long
Machiavellian tradition, the Kurdish officials said.
"They work with groups like Ansar, whose ideology is
so opposed to theirs, because they want to have a
card to play in Iraq," Saeed said.
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at cambanis@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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