By Jeffrey Gettleman
New York Times
25 February 2004
Ali Hamaamin said he had been whipped with electrical cords, hung by his arms and kicked in the face. Because he was accused of not being religious, he was repeatedly tortured by men from the militant Islamic group Ansar al-Islam.
"They used to come to me at night, wearing masks, and do the most horrible things," said Mr. Hamaamin, who lives in Beyara, a village near the Iranian border.
His ordeal ended with the United States-led invasion of Iraq last year, when American Special Forces and Kurdish militias routed Ansar al-Islam, which once tried to set up a Taliban-like state in the jagged mountains along the border with Iran.
But Ansar is making a resurgence, Kurdish and American officials say.
According to interviews with captured Ansar members, the group is branching out from its former mountain strongholds to cities across Iraq. Its mission, too, has expanded, they say, from terrorizing local villagers to planning suicide bombings against the American-led occupation.
American officials are now blaming Ansar for many of the recent suicide attacks that they say pose the greatest threat to the fragile Iraqi state. So far this month at least 230 people, primarily members of Iraqi security forces, have died in suicide bombings.
"We've seen a real step up on the part of these professional terrorists from Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam conducting suicide attacks," L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, said on Monday.
A senior United States military official said Ansar was in "an intense period of evolution" and had recently formed a partnership with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda.
"Mr. Zarqawi is the senior partner and Ansar supplies the local expertise," said the military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
American officials announced Tuesday that troops killed one of Mr. Zarqawi's top aides, a bomb maker named Abu Muhammad Hamza, in a shootout on Thursday in Habbaniya, about 50 miles west of Baghdad. The soldiers discovered explosive materials and Jordanian documents with Mr. Hamza, but American officials said they did not know what his connection was to Ansar.
Ansar lives in a landscape of shadows. The contours of its operations are known but the details remain murky.
Several Ansar members captured in recent months said the group was trying to reorganize in Erbil, one of the largest cities in northern Iraq. The prisoners, kept in a jail in Sulaimaniya in northeastern Iraq, were made available to The New York Times by Kurdish security forces.
"Our leaders have been looking for men to send back to Erbil to make operations," said Muhammad Khalid, 30, an Ansar fighter captured last summer as he crossed from Iran into Iraq. "That's where I was going."
Shahab Ahmed, another Ansar prisoner, said: "Our mission has become bigger than Kurdistan. We made car bombs from rockets, and we were told that if we killed Americans we would go to Paradise."
Mr. Ahmed, who warmed his handcuffed hands in front of a space heater as he talked, said there were Ansar suicide cells in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Falluja and Mosul.
According to a report prepared by the Kurdish authorities, Ansar recently had a pipeline of young men schooled to die. In June 2002, the report says, a 19-year-old former mechanic, Didar Khalan, was tackled at a Kurdish political party headquarters in Sayed Sadiq, in northern Iraq, just as he was about to blow himself up.
Mr. Khalan told investigators that Ansar's leaders sent him to the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan wearing a vest packed with TNT. To get into the office, Mr. Khalan was instructed to ask for Muhammad, a common name. Once inside, if 20 people or more were present, Mr. Khalan was to connect two wires in his pocket.
But as soon as he arrived, guards noticed that he was acting nervously and surrounded him, the report says.
"They put me on the ground, and they gathered around me and they took off the clothes and cut off the wire," the report quoted Mr. Khalan as saying.
He said seven other Ansar members in his operational cell had also been given TNT suicide jackets and trained to be human bombs. Some were Kurds, others Turkmen. All were from northern Iraq, like himself.
According to the report, they were told to attack the leading Kurdish political parties because they "were working for American intelligence and were Jewish."
He also said that for three days before his mission, he had been locked in a room with an Ansar mullah who had talked about Paradise and fed him a special soup that made him feel strong.
Kurdish officials say Mr. Khalan is now in American custody and may be a witness against Mullah Krekar, the Ansar leader arrested in January in Norway on terrorism charges.
American and Kurdish intelligence agents suspect that the deadliest attack carried out so far in Iraq — the twin suicide bombings on Feb. 1 of Kurdish headquarters in Erbil, which killed at least 105 people — was the work of Ansar. On several Islamic Web sites, a wing of Ansar al-Islam took responsibility, saying the Kurdish leaders were American pawns.
"Ansar is not finished," said Anwar Haji Osman, security chief for the Halabja area. "In fact, we have word they are planning another serious operation. The Erbil bombings will only encourage them."
And Ansar activity seems to be increasing. Three weeks ago, Kurdish security agents said, seven wanted Ansar terrorists slipped through the porous Iraq-Iran border and were arrested, including a Palestinian, a Yemeni and a member of the group's fatwa committee, which issues religious-inspired edicts.
Though the border with Iran is a flash point in the campaign against terror, where the American-led occupation rubs up against part of what President Bush has called an "axis of evil," it is not heavily patrolled.
In many places there are no guards or even fences marking the border, just thick, muddy roads plied by sinewy herdsmen and donkeys.
"This is Iran," Khalid Karim, a Beyara village official, said as he planted one boot in a seemingly arbitrary spot. "And this is Iraq," he said, straddling the frontier. There was not a checkpoint in sight.
About an hour away along the border stands a tall metal gate where Iranian border guards face off with Kurdish militiamen. On the Iranian side is a large sign that reads: "Death to Israel. Death to America."
Kurdish officials say more than 100 Ansar fighters live just across the border in Iranian villages.
During a trip to Baghdad this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Syria and Iran were continuing to allow terrorists to slip across their borders. "We are not getting good cooperation with Iran and Syria," he said.
Ansar al-Islam, whose name means Supporters of Islam, started in northern Iraq in 2001 as a merger of several militant Kurdish groups dissatisfied with the mainly secular policies of the two leading Kurdish political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
After the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, in December 2001, many members of Al Qaeda working with the Taliban fled across Iran and eventually linked up with Ansar fighters in northeastern Iraq.
Villagers in Beyara said the Ansar fighters, who included Arabs, Afghans, Turks and Chechens, imposed a strict religious code, prohibiting women to leave their homes and outlawing television, music and even backgammon. They meted out public beatings and strutted around with swords.
"Sometimes they told us it was against the Koran to laugh," said Mr. Hamaamin, the construction worker who was tortured.
What was curious, many villagers said, was that the Ansar fighters did not work in the terraced walnut groves or collect timber like most other people. "But they always had money, lots of American money," said Hamatofiq Abdul Ghafur, owner of a tea shop.
Kurdish and American officials said interrogations of Ansar prisoners and contacts in Iran led them to believe that Al Qaeda was funneling Ansar cash through Iran.
Beyara has changed since Ansar was driven out. The television sets returned. So did the music. Village elders even built a playground on the side of a mountain.
But Mr. Hamaamin says he will never totally recover.
"I know the Americans and the others will do their best to keep Ansar away," he said. "But I still worry." Sometimes, he said, it is hard to fall asleep. He says he still sees the masks.
----------------------------------------------------
Citation: Jeffrey Gettleman, "Anti-U.S. Kurdish Militants Rebounding, Officials Say," New York Times, 25 February 2004
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/25/international/middleeast/25ANSA.html?pagewanted=print&position=
----------------------------------------------------