Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

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Revue de Presse-Press Review:"Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro
de la Prensa-Baszn Özeti
Kurdish officials say that the merger took place in a ceremony oyerseen by three Arabs trained in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan,
and that these men supplied Ansar àl-Islam with three hundred thousand dollars in seed money. Soon after the merger, a unit of
Ansar al-Islam called the Victory Squad attacked and killed the peshm~ga in Kheli Hama.
Among the Islamic fighters who were there that day was Rekut Hiwa Hussein, a slender, boyish twenty-year-old who was captured
by the peshmerga after the massacre, and whom I met in the prisonin Sulaimaniya. He was exceedingly shy, never looking up from his
hands as he spoke. He was not handcuffed, and had no marks on the visible parts of his body. We were seated in an investigator's
office inside the intelligence complex. Like most buildings in Sulaimaniya, this one was warmed by a single kerosene heater, and the
room temperature seemed barely above freezing. Rekut told me how he and his comrades in Ansar aI-Islam overcame the peshmerga .
"They thought there was a ceasefire, so we came into the village and fired on them by surprise," he said. "They didn't know what
happened. We used grenades and machine guns. We killed a lot of them and then the others surrendered." The terrorists trussed
their prisoners, ignoring pleas from the few civilians remaining in the town to leave them alone. "The villagers asked us not to
slaughter them," Rekut said. One of the leaders of Ansar al-Islam, a man named Abdullah al-Shafi, became incensed. "He said, 'Who is
saying this? Let me kill them.' "
Rekut said that the peshmerga were killed in ritual fashion: "We put cloths in their mouths. We then laid them down like sheep, in a
line. Then we eut their throats." After the men were killed, peshmerga commanders say, the corpses were beheaded. Rekut denied
this. "Some of their heads had been blown off by grenades, but we didn't behead them," he said.
I asked Rekut why he had joined Ansar al-Islam. "A friend of mine joined," he said quietly. "I'don't have a good reason why I joined."
A guard then took him by the elbow and returned him to his cell.
The Kurdish intelligence officials I spoke to were careful not to oversell their case; they said that they have no proof that Ansar
aI-Islam was ever involved in international terrorism or that Saddam's agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. But they do have proof, they said, that Ansar al-Islam is shielding Al Qaeda members, and that it is doing so with
the approval of Saddam's agents. '
Kurdish officials said that, according to their intelligence, severaI men associated with Al Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian
border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near Halabja. The Kurds believe that two of them, who go by the names Abu Yasir and
Abu Muzaharn, are high-ranking Al Qaeda members. "We don't have any information about them," one official told me. "We know
that they don't want anybody to see them. They are sleeping in the same room as Mala Krekar and Abdullah al-Shafi"-the nominal
leaders of Ansar aI-Islam.
The realleader, these officials say, is an Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Wa'el, and who, like the others, spent a great deal of time in
bin Laden's training camps. But he isaIso, they say, a high-ranking officer of the Mukhabarat. One senior official added, "A man
named Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat. And he is Abu Wa'el's control officer."
Abu Agab, the official said, is based in the city of Kirkuk, which is predominantly Kurdish but is under the control of Baghdad.
According to intelligence officials, Abu Agab and Abu Wa'el met last July 7th, in Germany. From there, they say, Abu Wa'el travelled
to Afghanistan and then, in August, to Kurdistan, sneaking across the Iranian border.
The Kurdish officials told me that they learned a lot about Abu Wa'el's movements from one of their prisoners, an Iraqi intelligence
officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammad, and they invited me to speak with him. Qassem, the Kurds said, is a Shiite from Basra, in
southern Iraq, and a twenty-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence.
Qassem, shambling and bearded, was brought into the room, and he genially agreed to be interviewed. One guard stayed in the
room, along with my translator. Qassem lit a cigarette, and leaned back in his chair. I started by asking him if he had been tortured by
his captors. His eyes widened. "By God, no," he said. "There is nothing like torture here." Then he told me that his involvement in
Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but
who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted
him to one of Saddam's paIaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself. .
Qassem's capture by the Kurds grew out of his last assignment from the Mukhabarat. The Iraqi intelligence sen'ice received word
that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American agents. "I was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find Abu Wa'el or, at least, .",
information about him," Qassem told me. "That's when I was captured, before I reached Biyara." ,
r asked him if he was sùre that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side. "He's an employee of the Mukhabarat," Qassem said. "He's the
actuaI decision-maker in the group"-Ansar al-Islam-"but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat." According to the Kurdish
intelligence officials, Abu Wa'el is not in American hands; rather, he is still with Ansar aI-Islam. American officials declined to comment.
The Kurdish mtelligence officials told me that they have Al Qaeda members in ~stody, and they introduced me to another pris?ner, a
young Iraqi Arab named Haqi Ismail, whom they described as a middle- to high-ranking member ~f Al Qaeda. He was, t~ey séUd, .
captured by the peshinerga as he tried to get into Kurdistan three weeks after the ~tart of t~e Amencan attack on A~g~a~stan. Ismall,
they said, comes from a Mosul family with deep connections to the Mukhabarat; his uncle ISthe top Mukhabarat offICIaIln the south
of Iraq. They said they believe that Haqi Ismail is a liaison between Saddam'sintelligence service and AI Qaeda.
Ismail wore slippers 'and a blarlket around his shoulders. He was ascetic in appearance and, at the same time, ostentatiously smu~. He
appeared to be amused by the presence of an American. He told the investigators that he would not talk to the C.I.A. The KurdlSh
investigators laughed and said they wished that I were from the C.I.A.
Ismail said that he was once a student at the University of Mosul but grew tired of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Luckily, he
said, in 1999 he met an Afghan man who persuaded him to seek work in Afghanistan. The Kurdish ~vestigators s~iled as Ismail went
on to say that he found himself in Kandahar, then in Kabul, and then somehow-here he was exceedmgly vague-m an Al Qaeda
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