Now this is interesting >>>>
U.S. to back Kurd assault on Ansar al-Islam base
Al-Qaida affiliates among 1st targets of planned Iraq invasion
February 10, 2003
United States Special Forces are on the ground in northern Iraq scouting positions ahead of an attack on al-Qaida affiliated operatives, reports Dubai Gulf News.
According to the report, Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was promised U.S. military backing for an assault on the Ansar al-Islam enclave during meetings with Zalmay Khalilzad, President George W. Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, in Ankara last week.
Under the agreement, the radical Islamic group will be one of the first targets of any U.S.-led invasion. Air strikes would pave the way for Talabani's militia on the ground. Kurdish officials have been supplying information on targets for U.S. F-16 fighters and B-2 bombers based in Turkey.
As WorldNetDaily has reported, Ansar al-Islam is led by an Iraqi Kurd named Nejmeddin Faraj Ahmad (also known as Mullah Krekar) who trained with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It emerged shortly after Sept. 11, declaring war on the secular Kurdish parties opposing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime.
The group operates two training camps and controls several villages in a pocket of Kurdish territory near Halabja along the border with Iran that quickly became a safe haven for fleeing al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan. Estimates of the group's armed militia range from 700 to more than 2,000.
Ansar operatives killed a senior Kurdish commander and five other people – including a child and two other civilians – in an attack late Saturday night, according to The Scotsman.
The attack happened after Ansar lured commander Shawkat Haji Mushir and security officers with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) politburo to a meeting ostensibly to negotiate the defection of Ansar members. Ansar members opened fire with guns and threw grenades as soon as the "meeting" began.
"They [Ansar] have once again proven their brutality, that they are terrorists and that they are against all humanity," a senior PUK official told The Scotsman. "The time has come to clean the area of them."
Kurdish officials claim there have been other bombings, suicide-bomb attempts and assassination attacks on Kurdish leaders.
Last April, an Ansar commando attempted to assassinate PUK Prime Minister Barham Salih and killed five of his bodyguards.
Establishing Ansar bases in Iraq "was part of a deliberate process," Salih told the Associated Press last October, "to set up alternative bases for al-Qaida away from Afghanistan."
In his presentation to the United States Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Baghdad had an agent in the most senior levels of Ansar.
Talabani told Gulf News that Ansar members were given passports and safe houses in Baghdad.
worldnetdaily.com |
