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Leading Kurd Blames Iran for the Terror
25.4.2007
By ELI LAKE |
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Leading Kurd Blames Iran for the Terror. Peace Would
Follow New Regime, He Says
April
25, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region (Iraq) — While
Iran's connection to Sunni Islamist terrorism is
hotly debated in Washington, it is not disputed in
Iraqi Kurdistan, about 60 miles from the border with
the Islamic Republic.
In an interview yesterday inside his headquarters,
the director of the security ministry for the
Sulaimaniyah province, Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, said he
has no doubt Iran is helping send Sunni jihadists
into his territory. He listed the five border towns
on the Iranian side where he says they are based:
Mariwan, Pejwan, Bokan, Sina, and Serdai.
For General Jalal, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's original
group, known as Tawhid and Jihad, was sent by the
Iranians and Al Qaeda to attack the Kurds and
Americans. At the end of a 90-minute interview, he
summed up his view of Iran as follows:
"Iran is at the top of the terrorism in all the
world. There will be peace in the world when you
change the authorities in Iran." He is in a position
to know; Kurdish Islamist groups, by his count,
tried to assassinate him on three separate
occasions.
Those direct public remarks are almost singularly
rare for a senior Kurdish official. When American
forces on January 10 seized five Iranians it claimed
were members of Iran's elite Quds Force in the
Kurdistan provincial capital of Irbil, Iraq's
foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, publicly
urged the Americans to return the men he claimed
were acting as diplomats.
Privately, Kurdish officials say the supposed
diplomats were supporting terrorists, providing maps
and training, but that the raid failed to net any
senior Iranian operatives despite initial
intelligence suggesting the no. 3 man in the Quds
Force was there.
Other senior Kurdish officials here note the
sensitive position of Sulaimaniyah in particular,
with its reliance on Iran for electricity, gasoline,
and trade. In an interview, the governor of the
Sulaimaniyah province, Dana Ahmed Majid said of the
Iranians, "We are brothers, not friends. Brothers
you cannot choose, you cannot choose your neighbor."
But for General Jalal, Iran is also a source of
jihad. He said, "There are these jihadists in Iran.
The Iranian authorities know about them. They have
big capabilities and they are based close to our
border. I ask, who can cross that border without the
Iranians knowing? They can turn the dial up or
down."
The main threat for Iraq's Kurds here is the next
generation of Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist group
initially affiliated with the leader of Al Qaeda in
Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has since been slain.
In 2002, Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate the
current deputy prime minister, Barham Salih.
The organization has also attacked Kurdish police
chiefs. In the first days of the war, the base of
the organization was destroyed at their camp in
Biara, near the Kurdish town of Halabja, the site of
the Iraqi army's infamous poison gas attack in 1988.
The American and Kurdish operation, known as Viking
Hammer, wiped out the Ansar al-Islam base, but many
of the senior leaders fled to Mariwan and the other
towns on the Iranian side of the border. Since 2003,
the Kurdish security services have been fighting a
campaign to keep the new Islamists, who have
regrouped under the banner of Ansar al-Sunna, out of
Iraq and out of their territory. Today that group's
Web site calls itself Al Qaeda in Kurdistan.
Military intelligence in particular has linked
members of Iran's Quds Force in Iraq to supporting
operations and individuals in the new Ansar al-Sunna,
as The New York Sun first reported in January. On
April 10, Major General William Caldwell announced
that America had evidence of Iranian support and had
found Iranian-produced arms in Sunni terrorist
strongholds.
In the interview, General Jalal says his 300-man
outfit has arrested more than 100 jihadists who have
crossed into his province from Iran since 2003. They
include a husband and wife team, who he identified
by their first names, Tooba and Khasraw, that tried
to establish a safe house to recruit, fund, and
equip suicide bombers; as well as an adolescent
Iranian boy who was traveling through northern Iraq
in order to detonate himself in Baghdad.
General Jalal also said the Iranian border area is a
transit point for foreign Arab terrorists from as
far away as Libya. Other counterterrorism officials
this week confirmed the assessment. One senior
official who works for a branch of the Iraqi
government, as opposed to the regional Kurdistan
government, also said Iran has helped Ansar al-Sunna
establish Iranian nongovernmental organizations.
General Jalal yesterday said his best weapon against
the jihadists is the majority of Kurdish citizens.
"We are getting tips all the time," he said. When
asked how he knows to distinguish between a
potential terrorist and, say, an average worker, he
says his network is superior to Iran's and the
Islamists.
He pointed out that border guards on the Kurdish
side are trained to spot freshly shaven beards, for
example. He said, "When they come here they get into
cars at strange places on the roads. They come down
from the mountains and show up on the highways."
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