Free Republic

<p>A Road to Ansar Began in Italy Wiretaps are said to show how Al Qaeda sought to create in northern Iraq a substitute for training camps in Afghanistan.</p> <p>Investigators say the case offers a picture of how Al Qaeda sought to transform Ansar's Iraqi stronghold into a substitute, on a smaller scale, for the Afghan camps to which the terrorist network had sent aspiring holy warriors before the U.S. defeated the Taliban in late 2001. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, members of a network commanded by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a top Al Qaeda figure, fled to the Russian republic of Chechnya and northeastern Iraq. U.S. and European investigators say Zarqawi's specialists used a camp in the village of Sargat, near Kurmal, to experiment with cyanide poisons, toxic gas and ricin, a castor bean extract that can be used as a biological weapon.</p>

Iraqi Kurds repulse Islamists attackFrom the International DeskPublished 3/25/2003 1:23 PMView printer-friendly version ARBIL, Iraq, March 25 (UPI) -- Iraqi Kurdish forces have repulsed an attack by Ansar al-Islam in an area near the Iranian border in a first such offensive since the Muslim hardliners' positions in northern Iraq was hit by a U.S. missile strike, a Kurdish official said Tuesday.Saadi Bira told United Press International that the Peshmerga forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, run by Jalal Talabani, repulsed Monday an attack by Ansar al-Islam which was believed to have links with al-Qaida.Bira, the PUK official in...