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ARBIL AND
SULAYMANIYAH, KURDISTAN (Iraq) – In the
gathering dark inside the cavernous mosque, Mullah
Omar Sweri takes his time leading the last Muslim
prayer session of the day.
The Sunni preacher speaks of moderation, a message
commonly heard in the officially monitored mosques
of the Kurdish north. The contrast could not be
greater, measured against the harsh rhetoric of the
Sunni militants to the south, who drive Iraq's
insurgency.
So it was a surprise to many Kurds that small Al
Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunna cells were among six groups
of extremists arrested in Arbil this summer - and
that nearly all the militants were home-grown Kurds.
"Kurds are religious people, but they have never
been extremists - God does not need extremists,"
says Mullah Sweri. "Extremism is not an action, it
is a reaction. So the more injustice grows in a
society, the more extremism there will be."
While the cells were small, they were lethal. Among
them were militants deemed responsible for suicide
bombings on May 4 and June 20 that killed more than
75 people in Arbil, mostly police recruits. In
confessions shown on TV, some described mortar
attacks on South Korean coalition troops, and a
botched remote-controlled bombing.
In the totality of violence in Iraq today, the
northern Iraq attacks and subsequent arrests might
seem little more than a footnote. But the fact that
these militants are Kurds highlights a little-known
history of how Islamist ideology first came to
northern Iraq - and how today it is helping bolster
the ranks of the insurgency.
Analysts say that key factors include Saudi Arabia's
proselytization and mosque-building here in the
1990s, combined with the return of mujahideen
veterans from the Afghan war against the Soviet
Union.
"They were trying to create a new generation of
jihadists in Kurdistan," says Nyaz Saeed Ali, a
specialist on Islamic Fundamentalism who heads the
"Cadre's Institute" of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main political parties
in northern Iraq.
"When they came back they wanted to duplicate the
[Afghan] experience in Kurdistan, and fight the
secular government," says Mr. Ali, who says he was
unsuccessfully targeted last year by one Ansar cell.
"The purpose of their return was not to fight Saddam
Hussein, but secular Kurds."
Many bolstered the ranks of the Islamic Movement of
Kurdistan (IMK), which fought the PUK from 1993, and
later joined its regional government. By the time
the US invaded Iraq a decade later, Islamist groups
had split and split again, and targeted most Kurdish
political factions. The most significant to emerge,
by 2001, was Ansar al-Islam.
Though it had ties with Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam
bases were limited to a remote strip of villages on
Iraq's northeastern border with Iran where,
ironically, they were part of the Kurdish safe haven
protected by US and British warplanes. The bases
were destroyed by US airstrikes in 2003.
But their growth here is also a cautionary parable
of how a few persistent seeds of Islamic radicalism,
no matter how unwelcoming the soil, can take tenuous
root. Experts and security officials, as well as
arrest patterns of Kurdish militants, indicate that
after fleeing to Iran, one wing of dispersed Ansar
members hooked up with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al
Qaeda in Iraq, which works out of Baghdad, Fallujah,
and western Anbar Province. A second wing, under the
rubric Ansar al-Sunna, operates from points north
such as Baquba, Tikrit, Mosul, and Kirkuk.
"There are two million people [in Kurdistan], and
they have their ideas - at least 20 would follow
radical thinking," says Esmat Arkoshi, the chief of
security for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in
Arbil. "When they were captured [and confessed
publicly], they didn't know their religion deeply -
they knew they had been cheated."
The lack of local sympathy for the extremists, and
efficient Kurdish security operations, mean that
most attacks here are ordered from bases elsewhere.
"There are some small, hidden signs of their
presence in Kurdistan, but they are not easily
recognizable, and work under the umbrella of [legal]
Islamic parties," says Ali, the PUK Islamist expert.
"We have our own agents among these groups, trained
to infiltrate. They are under constant watch."
For years, the appeal of fighting for a cause has
drawn young Kurdish men beyond Kurdistan's borders.
The first key departure took place after the
collapse of Kurdish resistance in 1975, led by
Mustapha Barzani, in the aftermath of the Algeria
agreement made between Iran and Iraq.
"The people gave up hope in [Kurdish] nationalist
ideology, and began to look for alternatives," says
Mohammed Ihsan, the Minister for Human Rights of the
Kurdistan Regional Government. Many Kurds went to
Iran, where the government, after the 1979 Islamic
revolution, helped create Kurdish Islamic parties.
Later, Saudi Arabia, in a bid to counter the growing
power of Mr. Hussein, established links to Islamist
Kurds.
Other Kurds traveled to Pakistan and eventually
Afghanistan, where they trained and fought alongside
the mujahideen against the Soviets.
These paths all coincided during the 1991 Gulf War
and its aftermath, which witnessed a Kurdish
uprising in northern Iraq. That rebellion failed to
topple the government, but after an exodus of more
than 1 million Kurdish refugees, it led to the
creation of the Kurdish safe haven.
The Islamist Kurdish groups took advantage of this
disorder, working under the guise of the Saudi-based
International Islamic Relief Organization and other
"charities," which pumped $22 million a month into
Kurdish areas in 1992-93, says Mr. Ihsan.
"We were a devastated state, we had nothing," says
Ihsan, who took part in a pre-war opposition
conference in Beirut, where he said Saudi Arabia
pushed hard for "their" Kurdish Islamists to be
given a piece of the political pie. "They started to
pay people, give them salaries and jobs, and we had
nothing to offer."
In the decade starting in 1991, Saudi charities
built 1,832 new mosques - a boom that shocked
Kurdish officials to the point of clamping on new
restrictions in 2001. Along with the mosques came
the translated books and Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi
teaching, and the introduction of the Salafi strain
- which adheres to an even more puritanical, strict
interpretation of the Koran and forms the basis of
Al Qaeda ideology.
"Of course they tried to spread their ideologies
here," says Mullah Omar Changiany, a Saudi-trained
sheikh who was considered at the time one of the
importers of Salafi thinking in Kurdistan, until his
Sulaymaniyah mosque was burned down in 1993.
"After the uprising, after we had just got rid of
Saddam Hussein, we were just out of a prison - we
felt the taste of freedom," says Mullah Changiany.
"[But] because of lack of experience, we committed
mistakes."
Changiany now speaks with a moderate voice, and even
conducts the daily religious program on one official
Kurdish TV channel in Arbil. Today he says
extremists "are far from the real Islam.
"I can say the trend is still level, not up or
down," says Changiany. "It depends on the
government, and how it deals with this [Islamist]
problem. We shouldn't forget that terrorism is very
organized and has purpose, so ... we should avoid
giving excuses for terrorism to grow in our
country."
"There are more groups inside; the main danger for
Kurdistan is Islamic fundamentalism," says minister
Ihsan. "You can divert a good Muslim to a terrorist
Muslim very easily ... the answer is to fill the
vacuum."
Ihsan faults the ideology itself, and says adherents
can't be reformed. "Most of them are educated from
the same school [of thought]," says Ihsan. "They may
veer from the line, but they have the same
conclusion: 'Start to rule, if anyone doesn't like
it, kill them.' "
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