"That's the Kurds territory which was not under Saddam's
control.....but I think you know that.."
I wouldn't say the Kurds had complete control or that
Saddam had none in the north.......
.....The peshmerga, as the Kurdish guerillas here are known, remember how Ansar al-Islam troops surprised one of their units at Kheli Kama on September 23, 2001, and cut the throats of all their comrades there, even though they'd already surrendered. Ansar al-Islam is in the habit of videotaping its exploits, and the Kheli Kama massacre is locally available on CD-ROM.
It was shortly after the attacks of September 11 that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that has controlled this area since the last Gulf War, approached the Bush administration with a little problem of its own that Washington might be interested in. For several years, radical Islamic movements had been causing headaches for the PUK leadership. On September 1, 2001, several of them had united forces in Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), which had promptly declared a holy war against all secular Kurdish parties, which, in their mind, deviated from the true path of Islam.
The PUK had managed to defeat Jund al-Islam at first, but in December 2001 it resurfaced as Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam) led by mullah Fateh Krekar, an Iraqi Kurd with refugee status in Norway.
It was shortly after US troops had routed the Taliban and al-Qa'ida from Afghanistan, and the PUK was getting reports that al-Qa'ida fighters were making their way to Kurdish territory, where they could find refuge in the Shinerwe mountains.
What's more, reporters from The New York Times had come across documents in a former al-Qa'ida guesthouse in Afghanistan that discussed the creation of an "Iraqi Kurdistan Islamic Brigade". The documents were dated only weeks before Ansar al-Islam surfaced in Kurdistan......
The peshmerga commander in Biyara, Meriwan Taha, is confident that Ansar al-Islam has been dealt a definitive blow. "We have taken back all the villages," he says. "Any remaining 'Afghans' have fled to Iran. We know because we chased them all the way to the border." We followed a convoy of peshmerga and a dozen US special forces to within yards of the border. They were obviously tracking Ansar militants hiding out in the border area.
On April 1, at a rare appearance before the press in Halabja, US special forces talked about their operation here. "It was pretty damn successful," one said. "In 1½ days, a terrorist organisation that has had a grip on this region was rooted out and neutralised." He admitted that "there was a lot of fighting, the Ansar al-Islam and al-Qa'ida were not a pushover." Official PUK figures speak of 250 "Ansar and al-Qa'ida terrorists" killed out of a suspected force of 700.
Some of the most recent fighting was at Sargat, the place US Secretary of State Colin Powell named in his February speech before the UN as the location of a secret chemical weapons factory and lab.
When we visited the site on Monday there was no evidence of chemical weapons but we were told that specialised US and British teams had been at the site the day before and had carted off truckloads of evidence. What remained was self-made ammunition marked "Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan", underground arms caches and a network of caves.....
theaustralian.news.com.au |
