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Michael Rubin's Ansar al-Sunnah overview
On February 1, Iraqi Kurdish political leaders marked the Eid al-Adha holiday much as they have for the past ten years. In each provincial capital, the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP] and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] hosted receptions where local constituents could meet with party leaders and communicate their concerns. However, the festivities were brutally interrupted when suicide bombers entered the PUK and KDP headquarters in Erbil, detonating themselves almost simultaneously, killing 109 people, including KDP Deputy Prime Minister Sami Abdul Rahman and KDP Minister of Agriculture Saad Abdullah. Adnan Mufti, a head of the PUK office in Erbil and a former deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, survived the attack in his headquarters only because suspicious bodyguards rushed the bomber, shielding him from the full force of the blast (he was nonetheless badly wounded).Responsibility for the blasts was claimed by a hitherto obscure group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna (Defenders of the Tradition), which trumpeted the attack as a blow against "two dens of the devils . . . inflicting harm on the collaborators with the Jews and Christians."[1] The simultaneous suicide bombings - the first to cause mass civilian casualties in the once-peaceful Kurdish enclave  heralded the rise of a dangerous new amalgam of Kurdish Islamist militants who have returned to Iraq from Iran and foreign al-Qaeda operatives who have infiltrated the country from Syria. Ansar al-Sunna is an outgrowth of Ansar al-Islam [Defenders of Islam], a group with ties to Iran and which administration officials have linked to al-Qaeda.[2] Initially operating under the moniker Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), Ansar al-Islam grew out of the September 2001 unification of several militant Islamist groups which had taken root in the mountains of northern Iraq along the Iranian border. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-12-22 |
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