Fallout expected after Halabja hit by U.S. missiles
Strikes on Islamist group led to deaths of 46 Kurdish allies, Stephanie Nolen reports
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 4:19 AM EST Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2003
Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — Compared with the bombing in Baghdad and south, the U.S. campaign on the Halabja plain in northern Iraq may seem a minor sideshow in the war.
There are 52 confirmed dead after four nights of missile strikes on the Halabja area, as the U.S. provides air support for the Kurdish forces' long-planned campaign to rout out a radical Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam.
But the U.S.-led campaign here may have repercussions disproportionate to the size of the splinter group at which it was aimed.
Six of the dead guerillas belonged to Ansar, the ostensible target, which has been accused by Washington of having links to Al-Qaeda. But the other 46 were members of Komala al-Islamiyyah, the Islamic Group of Kurdistan, an organization that — until the bombs started falling on its bunkers — had a co-operation agreement with the Kurdish government that supports the U.S.-led invasion.
Komala positions have borne the brunt of the aerial attack, and the group is still digging out crumbled buildings in search of more victims. Its furious leaders say they received no warning, and they cannot understand why they were targeted.
Whatever the answer, it could leave the U.S. with a brand-new enemy, one with approximately 2,000 armed men. "It was a good idea to hit Ansar," said Shwan Mohammed, a reporter for the weekly Kurdish newspaper Hawlati. "But not to hit Komala."
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which governs the eastern half of the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq, has been at war with Ansar since it set up a Taliban-style regime in a sliver of territory near Iran three years ago and attacked the secular Kurd government.
It was the PUK that asked the U.S. for air strikes: While Ansar is believed to have only 700 fighters, they are dug into mountain crevices and are heavily armed, courtesy of the Iranian government and the easy access to smuggled weapons in the wild frontier area.
The PUK says that while it had a co-operation pact with Komala, the group was nonetheless working with Ansar, providing logistical support and allowing Ansar members to hide in Komala-controlled towns.
But the PUK also says that it gave Komala repeated warnings to separate its men from Ansar because they would be a U.S. target. A senior member of the government said Saturday, after the first strikes, "We advised them to get away from Ansar, to move away physically, and regrettably they did not follow our advice."
Komala's leader, Sheik Ali Bapeer, insisted yesterday that the group had received no such warning. "We didn't expect it and there was no reason for it," he told The Globe and Mail, in a rare interview with the Western media. "They never asked us to move."
He offered up a copy of a letter from the PUK leadership, which he said was delivered only an hour before the first strikes. It says: "Ansar is a terrorist organization and it will be attacked by us and by the Americans as soon as possible."
The PUK has apologized, he said, and sent condolences for the 42 dead, saying that it did not know Komala would be hit.
Sheik Bapeer, presumably mindful of the precarious position in which his organization now sits, refrained from accusing the Kurdish government of treachery. But he said it was highly unlikely the Americans, working in co-ordination with the Kurds, had "accidentally" hit Komala.
"There have been years of fighting between the PUK and Ansar, and there has never been one bomb on our locations," he said.
The other possibility is that the U.S. decided on its own to hit Komala. "The PUK denies they told them to target us," the Mr. Bapeer said, looking unconvinced.
While the PUK is apologizing publicly, its leaders, off the record, offer no sympathy. "There is no distinction between the Islamic parties," a political adviser to the government said privately this week. "The best thing is to eliminate them."
Ansar has responded to the air strikes with a suicide bombing that killed four Kurds and an Australian journalist. With U.S. military personnel moving into the area for a ground push on Ansar and a northern front in the war, there are a growing number of targets for potential Komala attacks.
Mediation by Iran has produced a temporary compromise: Mr. Bapeer's armed fighters will, with PUK help, move to new camps in the region of Qaladzah, 250 kilometres to the north. Mr. Bapeer said he would "not allow our fighters to fight" at this "sensitive time for our nation."
But he made it clear that Komala has plenty of angry young men in its ranks. "We have a saying in Kurdish: The day comes when you must pay your debts."
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