Senior Iraqi intelligence officers believe an Islamic militant group which has claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Irbil and a spate of deadly attacks in Baghdad, Falluja and Mosul is receiving significant help from Syria and Iran. The officers, who have been tracking the activities of domestic and foreign jihadists in northern Iraq, claim that members of Jaish Ansar al-Sunna (the army of the supporters of the sayings of the prophet) have been "given shelter by Syrian and Iranian security agencies and have been able to enter Iraq with ease". The group is suspected of training suicide bombers and deploying them against US forces in Iraq and Iraqis considered to be collaborating with the US-led authorities.
Jaish Ansar al-Sunna was one of a dozen Islamic militant organisations which issued a joint statement two weeks ago in Ramadi and Falluja warning Iraqis against cooperating with the occupation. It distributed CDs carrying video footage of some of its operations, which included roadside bomb attacks on US military convoys. US officials believe that since Saddam Hussein was captured in December the insurgency is being increasingly fought by Islamic guerrillas rather than former regime loyalists. While the Iraqi authorities are struggling to establish an effective intelligence operation in the centre and south of the country, in the north they have been able to build on the existing intelligence network in the Kurdish ruled area.
| Then why not expand the Kurdish network to cover the whole country? |
An intelligence officer in the northern city of Kirkuk said: "We have arrested a number of foreign Arabs that we believe may be connected to the global terror network. They all seemed to have Iranian or Syrian visas in their passports. A number of them told us they had received assistance in those countries." He said Hassan Ghul, a suspected al-Qaida operative found to be carrying a document urging the fomenting of civil war in Iraq, had been arrested by Kurdish forces on the Iraqi side of the Iranian border near the town of Kalar. Jaish Ansar al-Sunna is suspected of coordinating the infiltration of foreign militants - experienced terrorists and young footsoldiers - from Europe through Syria, the intelligence officer said. "We are not talking huge numbers, perhaps 100 since the war, but that is too much," he said. "We believe that there is a safe house for them near Damsacus. They are crossing the border west of Mosul, then heading for Mosul before dispersing to other cities."
He said Iran and Syria wanted to use the militant issue as a bargaining point in their relations with the US. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, said: "There are incidents of infiltration from the outside. "I do not want to accuse anyone, but we are not getting sufficient cooperation from our neighbours. If they believe they can play with the security of Iraq, they are playing with fire. It’s very dangerous."
Damascus and Tehran reject the allegation they are harbouring or facilitating jihadists and point to their increased cooperation with George Bush’s global war on terror. The Iraqi intelligence officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Jaish Ansar al-Sunna was believed to be a splinter group of Ansar al-Islam (supporters of Islam), an extreme Kurdish group with suspected links to al-Qaida. The group’s leader is identified on its website as Abu Abdullah al-Hassan bin Mahmoud, thought to be the brother of a leading Ansar al-Islam fighter. Ansar al-Islam was ousted from its stronghold at the beginning of the war by a joint operation involving PUK peshmerga forces and US air power. About 200 fighters fled to Iran, the intelligence official said. They had now had time to reorganise and had been filtering back into Iraq, where they had joined Sunni Arab extremists to form the new group. |