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Inside the birth of the Kurdish terrorist
organization.
IN A LETTER WRITTEN to the al Qaeda leadership in
early 2004, Abu Musab Zarqawi described the Iraqi
Kurds in less than favorable terms. As far as
Zarqawi was concerned, they were "a Trojan horse"
who had opened their land to the Jews and
established a society that served as the antithesis
to his extremist conception of Islam. There are many
reasons, however, to suspect that bin Laden differed
with the man he would later name as his
representative in Iraqi Kurdistan in this view.
While the puritanical strains of Islam favored by
bin Laden and Zarqawi hold little popular appeal to
most Iraqi Kurds, al Qaeda's interest in exploiting
the region runs deep. According to a former Ansar
al-Islam commander who was interviewed by the
Christian Science Monitor under the pseudonym Rebwar
Kadr Said, the links between Kurdistan's Islamist
minority and what would later become al Qaeda run
all the way back to the 1980s in Afghanistan, when
bin Laden's mentor, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, took
aside two men (a Kurdish Islamist named Faraj Ahmad
Najmuddin and a Palestinian) and told his followers
to look after the two groups that both men
represented, effectively placing the fate of the
Kurds on par with that of Palestinians in the eyes
of Azzam's followers.
Like far too many other groups of foreign veterans
of Afghan War, the Kurdish Islamists returned home
radicalized and--believing that Saddam secular
Baathism could be overthrown just as easily as the
Soviet communism--rallied for jihad against Baghdad
during the late 1980s and early 1990s. During the
uprising following the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurdish
Islamists appear to have caught bin Laden's eye.
The 9/11 Commission Report noted the al Qaeda
leader's past sponsorship of Kurdish Islamists in
the hopes of convincing them to join the nascent
terrorist coalition that he was assembling in Sudan.
Rohan Gunaratna, one of the world's leading experts
on al Qaeda, identified two propaganda tapes, amidst
the dozens of al Qaeda videos found in Afghanistan
by CNN, as having been produced by the Kurdish
Islamists. These tapes, among other things, identify
Saddam Hussein as an enemy of Islam and call for
jihad against the infidel Baath party.
WHILE MANY OBSERVERS and analysts have cited bin
Laden's early support for the Kurdish
Islamists--such as his early attempt to dissuade the
Saudi leadership from accepting Western support
following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by offering
to lead an army of mujahedeen against Saddam
Hussein--as evidence of the ultimate incompatibility
between the two men, they forget that as early as
1992 an internal Iraqi intelligence document lists
bin Laden as an intelligence asset, suggesting that
his prior willingness to field an army against the
Baathists had given way to more pragmatic thinking.
Similarly, while bin Laden was more than willing to
sponsor Kurdish Islamism against Saddam Hussein in
the aftermath of the Gulf War, any eagerness to aid
in the overthrow of Baathism in Iraq appears to have
paled in comparison to his desire to accommodate
Hassan Turabi, who was al Qaeda's primary host while
the organization operated in Sudan. As noted in the
9/11 Commission Report, Turabi (who had previously
backed Saddam during the Gulf War) brokered an
agreement under which bin Laden would cease
supporting anti-Saddam activities. And while the
9/11 Commission Report noted that bin Laden
continued to support Kurdish Islamism even after
this agreement, it failed to note that by 1993 the
group had, by and large, ended its anti-Saddam
activities and instead was focusing on creating a
parallel Islamist Kurdish administration in contrast
to the more secular authority of the leading
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK). This move culminated in
armed clashes with the PUK in December 1993.
From an Islamist perspective, this should be seen
not only as a challenge against the major Kurdish
authorities but also as a challenge to the
establishment of anything resembling secular
democratic society in the Middle East. As with their
previous jihads against Saddam, the Kurdish
Islamists were defeated and eventually splintered
into a number of factions along the northern Iraqi
border with Iran. At the time, most observers
believed that the threat posed by Iraqi Islamism was
at an end.
YET ONCE AGAIN, al Qaeda disagreed. In April 2003
the New York Times reported that in 2000 and 2001
bin Laden hosted the several Kurdish Islamist
leaders in Afghanistan, urging them to put aside
past differences and form a single organization in
the region. Collin Powell's presentation before the
U.N. Security Council added yet another detail to
this picture, claiming that in 2000 an Iraqi
intelligence agent had offered al Qaeda Saddam's
blessing to establish a safehaven in northern Iraq,
a view that appears to be supported by a comment in
the 9/11 Commission Report: "There are indications
that by then [2001] the Iraqi regime tolerated and
may even have helped Ansar al-Islam against the
common Kurdish enemy."
Yet with or without Iraqi assistance, one by one the
Kurdish Islamist groups heeded bin Laden's call to
unite. In July 2001, the Kurdish Hamas united with
al-Tawhid, forming the Tawhid Islamic Front and
sending several members to Afghanistan for training.
Then in September 2001, Tawhid Islamic Front merged
with the Second Soran
Unit to become Jund al-Islam, after which time the
new organization launched a bloody campaign against
the ruling Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Despite its
small size, Jund al-Islam soon proved its worth in
battle against the PUK, quickly gaining the support
of another group of Kurdish Islamists led by Faraj
Ahmad Najmuddin, now known as Mullah Krekar. By
December 10, 2001 the two groups had merged together
and Ansar al-Islam was born.
Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for
the Manhattan Institute's Center for Policing
Terrorism.
www.weeklystandard.com
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