What use would they have been to Saddam inside the area controlled by Baghdad?
Excellent ripost, but in point of fact, they were not in an area controlled by the US, or the Kurds.
>>In Remote Corner of Iraq, an Odd Alliance
Enclave of Militant Kurds and Arabs Tied to Al Qaeda Likely to Be a Target of War
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 12, 2003; Page A01
ANAB, Iraq -- Most of the estimated 100 Arab extremists reported to have found a haven in this rocky corner of northern Iraq began arriving early last year, a few weeks after losing their camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
The Halabja Valley, their destination, is one of the more obscure places in the world, about 35 miles southeast of Sulaymaniyah and close to the mountainous border with Iran. A U-shaped enclave just inside Iraq had been taken over by radical Islamic Kurds, the Ansar al-Islam, who fielded an estimated 900 fighters and regarded the two secular Kurdish organizations who run the rest of northern Iraq as their enemies.
The Ansar-run pocket, although only 10 to 15 square miles, was the ideal place to hide out. Residents at nearby Anab, just north of Halabja on the road to Sulaymaniyah, noticed how intently their new neighbors guarded their privacy but did nothing to disturb it. The newcomers, they say, kept to a village reserved for Arabs, appeared in the market only to buy provisions and buried their dead in their own cemetery.
Since then, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have highlighted the foreign fighters' presence in the Ansar enclave in an effort to link Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and the government of President Saddam Hussein, which controls Iraq south of the Kurdish-administered zone but has little influence here. Citing interrogations of Ansar members who were taken prisoner, Kurdish political officials confirm that the group sent a steady stream of trainees to the camps that al Qaeda operated in Afghanistan until U.S. forces ended Taliban rule there at the end of 2001. Given those ties, the officials say, it was logical to expect Ansar to welcome the Arab fighters as they fled Afghanistan after being deprived of the Taliban's protection.
"The relationship between Ansar and al Qaeda is very much like the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan," said Barham Salih, the prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish administration that abuts the Ansar zone.
In fact, in the handful of poor villages with several thousand civilians that Ansar controls, the group enforces a Taliban-like social order. Satellite dishes, alcohol and tobacco are strictly forbidden. Women are obliged to cover their hair. Men must leave their shops and report to the mosque at every call to prayer.
As the world's attention shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, word of the outsiders spread, first to the Kurdish militia fighters arrayed in trenches facing the enclave, then to the U.S. intelligence teams in northern Iraq. Now, as a U.S. invasion force gathers to fight a war against Iraq, Kurdish officials say the Ansar enclave will be destroyed as part of the larger conflict.
"The situation is ideal for destroying them and capturing them," said Sheik Jafar, commander of the U.S.-allied Kurdish militia arrayed opposite the enclave.
In anticipation, civilians have begun moving out of the Halabja Valley, saying they fear the bombs and missiles they expect U.S. warplanes to aim at the enclave. The Arabs are staying behind and building bunkers, they say.
As described by commanders and senior Kurdish officials, a U.S. attack would unfold on the edge of the Iraq campaign, combining U.S. aircraft and lightly armed Kurdish militiamen. U.S. bombers and attack helicopters would pound Ansar positions on the narrow valley floor and steep mountainside, the Kurds predict, paving the way for Kurdish ground forces to advance from their fortifications that surround Ansar on three sides.
The fourth side is a mountain range that forms the border with Iran, a silent player in the drama here. Long a supporter of Islamic extremists in the area, Iran denies persistent charges that it arms Ansar and permits its members easy passage through the snow-capped peaks.
Ansar has hunkered in the oblong strip of terrain since September 2001, when the band split from a more moderate Islamic movement long active around Halabja, the town where 5,000 Kurds died when Iraqi troops attacked with chemical weapons in 1988. Ansar declared jihad against the secular Kurdish parties and welcomed reinforcements entering from Iran.
In addition to a righteous cause, authorities say, Ansar offered the fugitives a remote refuge with no central authority, border formalities or threat of extradition.
"We have information that 20 new Arabs joined Ansar recently after they were unable to enter Chechnya," said Wasta Hassan, a Kurdish security official. "They came from Pakistan, where they had fled after the war with the U.S. in Afghanistan."
"Al Qaeda needed places in the world outside Afghanistan," said an Ansar member in Kurdish custody who gave his name as Rebwar.
A former Ansar commander, the prisoner said he grew disillusioned by the violent orientation of Ansar's leader, known as Mullah Krekar, and the pleasure that Krekar's fighters took in the killing of Kurdish militiamen, which was videotaped and posted on the group's Web site. Krekar, whose real name is Najumuddin Faraj Ahmad, lives in Norway, where he enjoys asylum after being released by Dutch authorities and questioned by the FBI.
The prisoner said a fellow fighter, now detained as a bin Laden associate in Britain, approved Krekar's plan to impose the Taliban's model in Kurdish territory. He said the same man financed the October 2000 travel of six future Ansar members to camps in Afghanistan, including one who returned with a handbook on poisons and a plan to poison the water supply of Sulaymaniyah.
Kurdish jailers described another prisoner, Haqi Ismail, as Ansar's liaison with al Qaeda. Ismail, in an interview, disputed that designation. The son of an Iraqi brigadier, Ismail said he drifted into Afghanistan during Taliban rule, fell under the influence of al Qaeda recruiters, spent two months at their Farouk training camp and decided to head back to Kurdish Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
"I'm a curious person, and that curiosity got me into trouble," he said.
Kurdish security officers arrested Ismail, 31, as he was checking into a hotel in Sulaymaniyah, the capital of the area administered by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the time he wore a long beard and had $600 but no identity papers. After 16 months in detention, he sported a gold chain and a goatee, and asked questions about movies, professing a greater interest in actresses than in jihad.
"I don't believe those things anymore," Ismail said, flashing a charming smile.
The role of the Arabs within Ansar remains murky. Kurdish officials and some prisoners maintain the new arrivals call the shots from behind the scenes, though the vast majority of Ansar's fighters are Kurds.
"The attitude of some of them is as leaders," said a man who recently moved from his home on the edge of Ansar territory, fearing U.S. airstrikes. "The people are afraid to ask them their origins."
Powell singled out a Jordanian visitor, Abu Musab Zarqawi, as the al Qaeda lieutenant who organized the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan in October. Kurdish officials, after first expressing surprise at the allegation, concluded they knew Zarqawi by an alias. They said that before disappearing, he also organized an attempt on the life of Salih, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's prime minister.
That April 2002 assassination attempt, which killed five bodyguards, was characteristic of Ansar's intensely local focus. Although al Qaeda leaders saw Ansar's territory as a refuge for an organization committed to global war on the West, the group itself appears preoccupied with defeating the secular Kurdish parties.
Ansar has killed a senior official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which administers the other half of the northern Kurdish zone under the protection of U.S. and British warplanes, and a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan minister. It has bombed beauty parlors in Sulaymaniyah and last month sent a suicide bomber to a Kurdish militia checkpoint, killing four people.
Just across the border, Iran has provided Ansar with military and material assistance, Kurdish militia leaders report. Iran's Revolutionary Guard patrols the border, which passes within 200 yards of Beyara, the largest village in Ansar territory, and thus controls access to the enclave.
Kurdish officials point out that Iran, with a restive Kurdish population of its own, has an interest in keeping off balance the Kurdish organizations that have enjoyed self-rule for the past decade. A Kurdish militia officer, Khali Faiq, said Iran is the only possible source of the ordnance Ansar lobs at Kurdish militia positions every day.
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