Very long, detailed, and fascinating article in The New Yorker on the Kurds, Halabja, Al Qaeda, Ansar al Islam, Iraqi Intelligence and Saddam Hussein. A must read.
Short excerpt on the connection between Al Qaeda, Ansar al Islam and Iraqi Intelligence:
Kurdish officials said that, according to their intelligence, several men associated with Al Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near Halabja. The Kurds believe that two of them, who go by the names Abu Yasir and Abu Muzaham, are high-ranking Al Qaeda members. "We don't have any information about them," one official told me. "We know that they don't want anybody to see them. They are sleeping in the same room as Mala Krekar and Abdullah al-Shafi"—the nominal leaders of Ansar al-Islam.
The real leader, these officials say, is an Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Wa'el, and who, like the others, spent a great deal of time in bin Laden's training camps. But he is also, they say, a high-ranking officer of the Mukhabarat. One senior official added, "A man named Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat. And he is Abu Wa'el's control officer."
Abu Agab, the official said, is based in the city of Kirkuk, which is predominantly Kurdish but is under the control of Baghdad. According to intelligence officials, Abu Agab and Abu Wa'el met last July 7th, in Germany. From there, they say, Abu Wa'el travelled to Afghanistan and then, in August, to Kurdistan, sneaking across the Iranian border.
The Kurdish officials told me that they learned a lot about Abu Wa'el's movements from one of their prisoners, an Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammad, and they invited me to speak with him. Qassem, the Kurds said, is a Shiite from Basra, in southern Iraq, and a twenty-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence.
Qassem, shambling and bearded, was brought into the room, and he genially agreed to be interviewed. One guard stayed in the room, along with my translator. Qassem lit a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair. I started by asking him if he had been tortured by his captors. His eyes widened. "By God, no," he said. "There is nothing like torture here." Then he told me that his involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.
Qassem's capture by the Kurds grew out of his last assignment from the Mukhabarat. The Iraqi intelligence service received word that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American agents. "I was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find Abu Wa'el or, at least, information about him," Qassem told me. "That's when I was captured, before I reached Biyara."
I asked him if he was sure that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side. "He's an employee of the Mukhabarat," Qassem said. "He's the actual decision-maker in the group"—Ansar al-Islam—"but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat." According to the Kurdish intelligence officials, Abu Wa'el is not in American hands; rather, he is still with Ansar al-Islam. American officials declined to comment.
And on Saddam's motives:
Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq's programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focussed on Israel. "Israel is the whole game," Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. "Saddam is always saying publicly, 'Who is going to fire the fortieth missile?' "—a reference to the thirty-nine Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. "He thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons." Chalabi added, "This is the only way he can be Saladin"—the Muslim hero who defeated the Crusaders. Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as a leader of all the Arabs, and that the one sure way to do that is by confronting Israel.
In the Gulf War, when Saddam attacked Israel, he was hoping to provoke an Israeli response, which would drive America's Arab friends out of the allied coalition. Today, the experts say, Saddam's desire is to expel the Jews from history. In October of 2000, at an Arab summit in Cairo, I heard the vice-chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, a man named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, deliver a speech on Saddam's behalf, saying, "Jihad alone is capable of liberating Palestine and the rest of the Arab territories occupied by dirty Jews in their distorted Zionist entity."
Amatzia Baram said, "Saddam can absolve himself of all sins in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim worlds by bringing Israel to its knees. He not only wants to be a hero in his own press, which already recognizes him as a Saladin, but wants to make sure that a thousand years from now children in the fourth grade will know that he is the one who destroyed Israel."
newyorker.com |
