N.Y. DAILY NEWS August 21, 2003
Iraq attacks linked to ousted guerrillas
By JAMES GORDON MEEK
N.Y. DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Aug. 21, 2003
WASHINGTON - One of the prime suspects in a wave of new terror attacks in Iraq are remnants of a small group of Islamic militants who scattered after their camp was devastated by American air strikes in March.
During the early days of the war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, U.S. special operations forces used B-52 bombers to blitz the mountain hideouts of Ansar Al-Islam in northern Iraq - but hundreds of its fighters escaped to nearby Iran and may be seeking revenge for the U.S. assault.
"It appears that a number of terrorists from the Ansar Al-Islam group have reinfiltrated into Iraq," Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, told NBC's "Today" show yesterday. "We are concerned about that."
Ansar Al-Islam is considered a suspect in Tuesday's deadly suicide bombing of the United Nations office in Baghdad and the Aug. 7 attack on the Jordanian Embassy, though American officials stressed Saddam loyalists could be to blame.
But survivors of the militant group - which once numbered more than 700 Iraqi Kurds and Arabs battling political groups vying for a Kurdish state - are renewing their strength as a guerrilla force by recruiting young Muslim foreigners to fight Iraq's occupiers, sources told the Daily News.
Bremer also said "foreign terrorists" are sneaking across Iraq's borders, and a U.S. intelligence official said Al Qaeda operatives are among them.
John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, said terrorists targeting Americans have easy pickings in Iraq.
"You don't have to go to America - America has come to you," Pike said. "You don't have to get your documents faked up or pass for an infidel. You just have to know how to drive a truck."
Ansar Al-Islam was formed in 2001 and placed on the State Department's list of terror groups days before the Iraq war began this year.
The group's spiritual leader, Mullah Krekar, is a Norwegian Kurd who has denied terror ties.
But in an Aug. 12 interview in Oslo with The Associated Press, Krekar said "it would be perfectly natural" for Ansar Al-Islam fighters to attack U.S. troops because the coalition "killed 253 of their brothers."
In the weeks before the Iraq war, the Bush administration pointed to the ties of an Al Qaeda sympathizer, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, to an Ansar Al-Islam camp in northern Iraq suspected of producing the poison ricin. But U.S. forces found no ricin after a raid, turning up only large sacks of castor beans - one of the ingredients to make the cyanide-like toxin.
Al-Zarqawi has been reported to be in Iranian custody.
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