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Iraqi Kurdistan send 1,000 Kurdish troops
to Iran border
10.5.2007
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Iraqi
Kurdistan send 1,000 Kurdish troops to Iran border
to prevent attacks by the Islamist terrorist group
Ansar al-Islam
May
10, 2007
SULAIMANIYAH, Kurdistan region (Iraq), May
10, -- Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region has sent
1,000 peshmerga troops to its border with Iran to
prevent attacks by the Islamist insurgent group
Ansar al-Islam, a spokesman said on Thursday.
Major General Jabbar Yawir said an Ansar-allied
group calling itself the "Kurdistan Brigades of
Al-Qaeda" has repeatedly attacked Iraqi Kurdish
forces in the region around the border town of
Penjwin.
"The forces sent shall be in two brigades," he told
AFP in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. "Some will
reinforce army units and border checkpoints and some
will mount patrols in the region to ambush the
enemy."
The peshmerga are former Kurdish separatist
guerrillas that have been incorporated into the
Iraqi and Kurdish armed forces in the four years
since a US-led invasion toppled the dictator Saddam
Hussein.
The Kurdistan autonomous region is regarded as
relatively peaceful compared to central and southern
Iraq, where attacks by Islamists and Saddam
loyalists have provoked a civil war between Sunni
and Shiite factions.
But the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam
continues to operate in the region, and US
commanders have accused neighbouring Iran of
sponsoring both Sunni and Shiite armed groups in a
bid to foment unrest.
On Wednesday, a powerful
truck bomb exploded in
front of the Kurdish interior ministry in Erbil,
killing at least 14 people. That attack was claimed
by the "Islamic State of Iraq", an Al-Qaeda front
organisation.
Mullah Krekar, the founder of radical and
Terrorist Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, whose real name is Fateh Najmeddin Faraj,
has lived in Norway as a refugee since 1991, and has
been under threat of deportation since Norwegian
media revealed he was the founder of the radical
Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, included on the
United States' and Kurdistan region list of terrorist organisations.
Krekar has said his life would be in danger if he
returns to Iraq.
In June he praised Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden
and the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
who was killed two weeks earlier.
"Osama bin Laden is a good man. I wish him a long
life. He is a good Muslim and he is against the Bush
administration," Krekar, known for his controversial
statements, told AFP in Oslo in 2006.
AFP
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