Posted on 03/31/2003 8:07:17 PM PST by truthandlife
- A U.S.-led assault on a compound controlled by an extremist Islamic group turned up a list of names of suspected militants living in the United States and what may be the strongest evidence yet linking the group to al-Qaida, coalition commanders said Monday.
The cache of documents at the Ansar al-Islam compound, including computer discs and foreign passports belonging to Arab fighters from around the Middle East, could bolster the Bush administration's claims that the two groups are connected, although there was no indication any of the evidence tied Ansar to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) as Washington has maintained.
There were indications, however, that the group has been getting help from inside neighboring Iran.
Kurdish and Turkish intelligence officials, some speaking on condition of anonymity, said many of Ansar's 700 members have slipped out of Iraq (news - web sites) and into Iran — putting them out of reach of coalition forces.
The officials also said a U.S. missile strike on Ansar's territory on the second day of the war missed most of its leadership — which crossed into Iran days earlier.
U.S. officials said the government had reports some Ansar fighters could have made it into Iran and have been shuttling back and forth with fresh supplies.
According to a high-level Kurdish intelligence official, three Ansar leaders — identified as Ayoub Afghani, Abdullah Shafeye and Abu Wahel — were among those who had fled into Iran. The official said the three were seen being detained by Iranian authorities Sunday.
"We asked the Iranian authorities to hand over to us any of the Afghan Arabs or Islamic militants hiding themselves inside the villages of Iran," said Boorhan Saeed, a member of the pro-U.S. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "We asked them about it Sunday, and still don't have a response."
Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned the Iranians to stop meddling in the war. Tehran denied any involvement.
Using airstrikes and ground forces, Kurdish soldiers and U.S. troops have cooperated in the past week to dislodge and crush Ansar militants in 18 villages surrounding the Iraqi city of Halabja — about 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.
"We actually believe we destroyed a significant portion of the Ansar al-Islam force there," Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations on the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Joint Staff, said Monday. He said forces were investigating the finds.
Among a trove of evidence found inside Ansar compounds were passports and identity papers of Ansar activists indicating that up to 150 of them were foreigners, including Yemenis, Turks, Palestinians, Pakistanis, Algerians and Iranians.
Coalition forces also found a phone book containing numbers of alleged Islamic activists based in the United States and Europe as well as the number of a Kuwaiti cleric and a letter from Yemen's minister of religion. The names and numbers were not released.
"What we've discovered in Biyare is a very sophisticated operation," said Barham Salih, prime minister of the Kurdish regional government.
Seized computer disks contained evidence showing meetings between Ansar and al-Qaida activists, according to Mahdi Saeed Ali, a military commander.
It was unclear how strong Ansar remains.
Officials from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two parties that share control of an autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, say they killed 250 Ansar members during two days of intense fighting and aerial bombardments.
"There was ferocious fighting," Saeed said. He said he chased 25 Ansar militants across the Iranian border and captured nine Ansar sympathizers belonging to a group called the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan.
The remaining Ansar fighters are thought to be in the mountains along the Iraq-Iran border, U.S. and Kurdish military officials have said.
Kurdish soldiers on Monday continued sporadic fighting in several villages around Halabja and along the Iran-Iraq border near the village of Sargat, site of a destroyed building once allegedly used by Ansar militants to produce poison.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday the Sargat compound was probably the site where militants made a biological toxin, traces of which were later found by police in London.
"We think that's probably where the ricin that was found in London came (from)" he told CNN's "Late Edition." "At least the operatives and maybe some of the formulas came from this site."
British police raided a London apartment in January and found traces of ricin, a powerful poison made from castor plant beans. U.S. officials believe the poison and those arrested were linked to Ansar.
The group's leader, Mullah Krekar, is being held in Norway on charges of kidnapping and aiding terrorists.
Krekar has denied any links to Saddam or al-Qaida, but said he considers Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) a "good Muslim."
In a recent interview with Dutch television, Krekar said his fighters would use suicide attacks if U.S. troops went after the group.
One such attack came three days into the war when an apparent car bomb killed at least five people, including an Australian cameraman, at a checkpoint near an Ansar training camp.
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militants
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Ansar militants
Ansar activists
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Ansar members
Ansar fighters
Ansar militants
I f***ing HATE the Associated Press.
Yet UBL, AQ's spiritual leader, had absolutely no problem whatsoever working hand-in-hand with the infidel Americans in liberating Afghanistan from the Soviets. But now he's going to turn his his back on Saddam's billions because of his "purity".
I heard Mike Farrell make the same argument.
"First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples."
"If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it."
"The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless."
"Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation."
"So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors."
"Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there."
"The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."
Notice no mention of the millions of Muslims that Saddam the infidel brutalized in Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. Notice all three points stress the protection of Iraq's Ba'athist regime.
Nah, UBL would never take Saddam's money and support to elevate himself. No way.
The fierce chaos I referred to would be Islamism boiling over, doing it's best to infect the world all round...free to develop the means of mass-murder which they would surely turn on us and the world around them.
The path you seem to advocate gets us not free from entanglement...it would get us dead.
from the Osama tape released before the war...
" The prophet said, those who fight to uphold the word of God, it is for the sake of God. It doesn't hurt, under these conditions, that the interests of Muslims contradict the interest of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders.
That's with our belief and our disclosure that the socialist are infidels. The socials and those rulers have lost their power a long time ago. The socialists are infidels where ever they are, whether they re in Baghdad or in Aden.
This fight that's going on, or that will be going on one of these days, resembles to a great extent, the fight of Muslims against the Romans and the contradiction of interests does not hurt because the fight against the Romans was against the interest of the Persians but that did not hurt the disciples of the prophet."
Osama says it is OK for Muslims to assist the Iraqis (socialists) against the Crusaders, even thought they are infidels.
If we know their location, it woud seem a simple matter to have some slight gps malfunctions occur on a few dozen jdams.
It wasn't that long and you are right on the money.
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