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SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- A series of suicide
bombings in previously peaceful northern Iraq has
aroused suspicions that elements of the Iranian
regime are backing efforts to destabilize the
region.
At least 85 persons have died and hundreds have been
injured in three attacks over the past two months.
An attack that killed the security chief and four
others in the northeastern town of Halabja in June
was the first of its kind in Sulaymaniyah province
since the fall of Baghdad.
Hours earlier, an explosion killed 20 military
recruits in the Kurdish capital of Irbil.
A man calling himself Molla Abbas took
responsibility for both attacks. "Our campaign will
escalate," he said in a phone call to the
independent Kurdish weekly Hawlati.
The name is familiar to Kurdish intelligence
officials. Abbas was a senior member of Ansar
al-Islam, an al Qaeda-linked Kurdish group that
controlled the mountains around Halabja until March
2003, when it was scattered by a joint U.S.-Kurdish
operation.
Abbas now is thought to be based in Kirkuk. What
worries Kurdish officials, though, is that many of
his former colleagues are living untroubled on the
other side of the Iranian border.
"Ansar is now based in Iran," said one senior
Kurdish intelligence officer. The attacks "could not
have happened without Iranian support."
The concern that Iran is meddling in Iraq is as
widespread among Iraqis as it is in the Pentagon.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a
Brussels-based policy institute, treated the charges
with skepticism in a March report, "Iran in Iraq."
Despite official Iranian denials, ICG concluded that
Kurdish assertions about Ansar "most likely have
merit."
For Iraqi Kurdish journalist Jemal Penjweni, who
last visited Iranian Kurdistan two months ago, the
charges are incontrovertible.
For at least the past eight months, he said, Ansar
escapees from Iraq have been hosted in two former
refugee camps near the Iranian town of Mariwan.
"Their numbers have increased thanks to
proselytization campaigns in the [Iranian Kurdish]
cities of Mahabad and Saqqiz," he said.
With anti-Americanism widespread among Iranian
Kurds, he said, "new recruits see Ansar as a means
of fighting both coalition forces and the quisling
Iraqis collaborating with them."
The authors of the ICG report suggested that Shi'ite
Iranian support of the Shi'ite-hating Ansar might be
an act of retaliation: Iraqi Kurdish parties have
long harbored two Kurdish Iranian opposition groups.
Others put down the apparent contradiction to
Iranian fears that Iraq's experiment in Kurdish
federalism could incite its own disgruntled Kurdish
minority. It is no coincidence, they say, that the
June 20 attacks came five days after Massoud Barzani
was sworn in as federal Iraqi Kurdistan's first
president.
"None of our neighbors approve of what is happening
here," said Ezzedin Berwari, a senior politician in
Sulaymaniyah. "None wish us success."
For Shwan Mohamed, political editor of Hawlati, the
real turning point in Iran's use of Ansar came with
the formation of Iraq's new government.
"Before then, Tehran was keen to see the Kurds
cooperate with the [Iraqi] Shi'ite parties," he
said. "Now that the Shi'ites are on top, Iran is
doing its best to weaken the Kurdish wing in
parliament. Bomb attacks up here are an ideal
distraction."
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