Kurdish Islamic Leader Arrested in Norway on Murder Charges

The Norwegian police arrested Mullah Krekar, the spiritual leader of the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam, on Friday on charges of attempted murder in connection with two suicide bombings in northern Iraq two years ago.

Norwegian law allows foreigners in Norway to be charged with certain crimes committed outside the country. But Mr. Krekar's lawyer said the timing of the arrest suggested that it was related to the recent terror alert in Hamburg, Germany. Officials there sealed off a military hospital on Tuesday after receiving information from American intelligence agencies, and the interior minister said Ansar al-Islam was suspected of planning an attack.

"They may be thinking that they can connect him to the threat against the hospital in Germany," the lawyer, Brynjar Meling, said by telephone from Oslo. By arresting Mr. Krekar, the Norwegian police gain access to all of his papers and computer files.

Mr. Krekar, a Kurd, was born Najm al-Din Faraj Ahmad in northern Iraq in 1956 and became active in the Iraqi Kurdish Islamic movement after Saddam Hussein attacked the ethnic group in the northern Iraqi city of Halabja in 1988.

He was granted refugee status in Norway after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but he later returned to northern Iraq, where he became a leader of the radical Islamic movement.

In December 2001, Mr. Krekar formed Ansar al-Islam from among the most militant members of the Kurdish Islamic movement after a bitter power struggle split it.

Mr. Meling said the warrant for Mr. Krekar's arrest cited his involvement in training suicide bombers for two attacks in early 2002, one in Halabja.

Mr. Krekar was arrested in Iran in May 2002 and deported to Amsterdam, where he was held for months and twice questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation before being sent to Norway in January 2003.

The United States has charged that Mr. Krekar's group was a key link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, part of the justification that Washington used in invading Iraq. In March, Mr. Krekar was arrested in Oslo and briefly held as the American-led war began.

Norway cleared Mr. Krekar of terrorism charges in July last year, but the United States has remained interested in his case. Many people in Norway believe that Mr. Krekar was one of the reasons Attorney General John Ashcroft visited Oslo late last year.

Since then, the Pentagon has blamed Ansar al-Islam for much of the violence directed at allied forces and international institutions in Iraq, including suicide bomb attacks against the United Nations and the Red Cross.

Last month, Italian investigators questioned Mr. Krekar about his knowledge of a reputed Ansar al-Islam cell in Milan, which Italian authorities believe was recruiting young Muslim men to fight allied forces in Iraq.

But in an interview late last year, Mr. Krekar denied having any current contacts with the Islamic group he founded.

Ansar Al-Islam have Kurdish leaders? Interesting..

Sept 4, 2003- Seattle Times - U.S. says al-Qaida ally spreading [Full Text] QALAT DIZAH, Iraq - The men carried dollars, euros, a flashlight and five fake Italian passports. They descended the dry, brown mountains, following twisted paths past campfires of nomads and shepherds, and slipped into town. People in this part of northern Iraq are especially wary of strangers; the police were summoned and the four men surrendered in the marketplace.

The men - two Kurds, a Palestinian and a Tunisian - are guerrillas in Ansar al-Islam, according to local security officials. Blending in with religious pilgrims and traveling on smuggling routes, the men were bound for central and southern Iraq, where the United States says Islamic militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists are staging attacks on civilians and killing American soldiers.

U.S. officials say that Ansar, the al-Qaida-linked militant group that was chased from its bases in the north in the first weeks of the Iraq war, is regrouping and spreading across the nation, becoming one of the parties responsible for the wave of terror against Americans and their allies. The violence is believed to be the work of insurgent cells that include former members of the Baathist regime and nationalists resisting occupation.

"A lot of (Ansar guerrillas) are in Baghdad," U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer recently said. "If Ansar decides to move, they'll move big."

Some local authorities dispute the belief that Ansar has the sophistication, tactics and manpower to orchestrate a countrywide terrorist campaign. But there is little doubt that Ansar has recalibrated its mission since March and is now a small but lethal threat to Western targets.

About 250 of Ansar's estimated 700 fighters were killed in attacks by U.S. and Kurdish forces in the spring, officials said. Its mountain strongholds were destroyed and its weapons caches, manuals and bombs seized. Hundreds of its members escaped into Iran or hid along the Iraqi-Iranian border. Its leaders, some of them wounded, vanished.

American officials often make little distinction between Ansar and the al-Qaida terrorist network. The groups have similar goals and a history of cooperation, and the characterization fits U.S. thinking about the increasing influence of foreign extremists in Iraq.

Some Ansar guerrillas, including three killed by police last week in northern Iraq, are attempting to join other Muslim extremists in operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces, according to Kurdish intelligence.

"There is a link between Ansar and some of what's happening in the south of Iraq," said Mohammed Haji Mahmud, the chief of a northern Iraqi socialist party that this year negotiated the surrender of 26 Ansar fighters, "but not to the level being reported in the international media. Ansar cannot operate to that extent. They don't know the terrain in the south."

The Bush administration had alleged that Ansar was running a "poison factory" capable of producing chemicals for terrorist attacks throughout the region and in Europe. The U.S. also asserted that Ansar provided a link between al-Qaida and the Saddam regime.

Those characterizations, which helped make Washington's case for war, were disputed by some European intelligence agencies.

The "poison factory" lacked sophistication and was housed in a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents. Tests by U.S. laboratories revealed traces of chemicals including hydrogen cyanide and potassium cyanide, substances usually used to kill rodents.

So far, no significant evidence has emerged that Ansar and al-Qaida cooperated with Saddam's regime to launch terrorist attacks against Western targets.

Ansar was formed from the merger of several Kurdish militant sects operating in the mountains along the Iranian border. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2001, between 50 and 100 mostly Arab al-Qaida fighters fled to Ansar camps for sanctuary.

Ansar quickly became an Osama bin Laden surrogate as its leaders modeled the group's training and tactics, religious philosophy and instruction for potential suicide bombers after al-Qaida. Ansar grew more rigid, and its Kurdish members were influenced by the Arab contingents arriving from Afghanistan.

After scattering during the U.S.-led attack against them, as many as 400 Ansar fighters fled to caves and villages in a 50-mile spine of highlands along and inside the Iranian border. The group has apparently transformed itself from a guerrilla army to a band of terrorist operatives. Many members are in Kurdish-controlled Iranian towns such as Mariwan, Pawa and Sina. The fighters, according to Kurdish officials, travel in cells of no more than four and receive instructions from a fighter known as Dr. Omar. The strength of their leadership is uncertain.

Two of their principal leaders - Ayub Afghani, a bomb maker, and Abdullah Shafi, a strategist - are believed to be in Iran. A third leader, Abu Wael, left northern Iraq with a small contingent of fighters shortly before the U.S. invasion and is said to be in Baghdad, according to a senior Kurdish intelligence officer. U.S. forces in Baghdad recently captured six men described as "Ansar financiers."

During the war, bomb vests and four cars laden with explosives and rigged for suicide attacks were discovered in Ansar strongholds after the group fled advancing U.S. and Kurdish forces.

According to phone intercepts by Italian investigators, Ansar was receiving assistance from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bin Laden ally who specialized in biologic al and chemical weapons.

The recent arrest of the four men in Qalat Dizah is another indication, according to Kurdish intelligence, that the predominantly Kurdish members of Ansar are assisting Arabs sneaking into Iraq from Iran and Syria. On Aug. 20, U.S. troops arrested an alleged al-Qaida operative in Iraq who possessed 11 surface-to-air missiles and acknowledged that he had trained with Ansar guerrillas.

Muslims in northern Iraq say the U.S. and Kurds are exaggerating the strength of Ansar to keep pressure on Islamic groups.

"It's not likely they are carrying out the attacks they are being blamed for. It is in the interest of some to amplify the size of Ansar. The United States sees Ansar as al-Qaida in Iraq and the United States is relying heavily on the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), which has a vested interest against political Islam," said Mohammed Hakim, an official with Komaly Islami, which calls itself a moderate Islamic organization. [End]

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