Senior al Queda figure captured in Iraq

He was probably just on vacation, I hear Iraq is nice in the winter.

 

Sweet. Let's round all these up.

 

edit: posted a couple articles to point out that this is not as black and white as the topic's headline indicates

Ansar al-Islam


I assume this is the story. I like the fact the headline doesn't match the content exactly.


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,109338,00.html


Suspected Al Qaeda Operatives Nabbed in Iraq

Friday, January 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — U.S. forces in Iraq believe they may be facing an Al Qaeda cell in Fallujah after two men with suspected ties to the terror network were captured in the last week, sources told Fox News Friday.



Husam al-Yemeni was arrested by U.S. forces last Thursday and is said to be part of the leadership structure of Ansar al-Islam (search), the Al Qaeda-associated terrorist group based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some U.S. officials described al-Yemeni as the first Al Qaeda operative captured in Iraq.

Another possible Al Qaeda operative, Hasan Ghul, was detained Thursday in Iraq. Ghul, a Pakistani, is known to have been an Al Qaeda member since the early 1990s, when Al Qaeda was established.

Officials said it was too early to be sure, but at least one guerrilla cell in Fallujah (search) — a Sunni Arab city known for its fierce enmity toward American forces — was believed to be linked to Al Qaeda. The officials said three other possible Al Qaeda operatives — two Egyptians and an Iraqi — had been captured in raids Sunday.

U.S. commanders in Iraq and Pentagon officials had said this week they were seeing signs foreign fighters were attempting to organize both inside and outside Iraq.

One official said Ghul was "definitely in Iraq to promote an Al Qaeda, Islamic extremist agenda." Ghul is described by officials as a facilitator known in terrorist circles as "the Gatekeeper" who moves money and people around the Middle East, Africa and possibly beyond. Officials added that Ghul has extensive contacts in Al Qaeda and wider terrorist communities, and is thought to have had some kind of connection to the 1998 East African embassy bombings, though officials stress those links are still being probed.

Al-Yemeni is believed to be the right-hand man to Abu Zarqawi (search), a man the Bush administration says has worked directly with Usama bin Laden. Zarqawi, who is believed to have been operating in Iraq before March's invasion, is still at large.

Early last year, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell detailed Zarqawi's significance in an appearance before the U.N. Security Council.

"Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants," Powell said.

Powell described Zarqawi as a Palestinian born in Jordan who fought in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. In 2000, Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan, where Powell said he oversaw terrorist training camps.

"One of his specialties at the camp was poisons," Powell said. "When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosives training center."

Fox News' Bret Baier and Ian McCaleb contributed to this report.





http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/ansarbk020503.htm

 

Instead of being terse, I'm quoting the full article for completeness here. Given his travelogue, we should be invading Iran, Syria, and Lebanon.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0123/p01s04-wome.html


A suspect emerges as key link in terror chain

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS – Wherever European prosecutors turn these days, as they unravel suspected Islamic terrorist cells and track leads across the Continent, they keep coming across the fingerprints of one man: Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Mr. Zarqawi, a one-legged Jordanian Bedouin currently thought to be hiding in Iran, has emerged as a central suspect in one Al Qaeda-related plot after another, investigators say, from allegedly smuggling suicide bombers into Iraq to orchestrating the recent car bomb blasts in Turkey and planning chemical attacks in Europe.



"He is arguably one of the most dangerous people out there in terms of the number of things he has his hands in," says Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism agent now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"He has a lot of connections to a lot of people, and what makes him most dangerous is his affiliations," Mr. Levitt adds.

Turkish police investigating last November's twin synagogue bombings in Istanbul arrested members of two Islamic groups they said had contacts with Zarqawi. Moroccan investigators concluded that Zarqawi organized and financed last June's quintuple bombing of Jewish and Israeli targets in Casablanca that killed 35 people. Italian and German police recently arrested three men on warrants charging them with helping would-be martyrs to travel from Europe to Iraq, at Zarqawi's behest.

Though intelligence analysts differ over Zarqawi's exact relationship to Osama bin Laden, they agree it has become clear that he has used his leadership of Al Tawhid, a Jordanian extremist group, to develop links not only with Al Qaeda but also with Ansar al-Islam, a radical Kurdish group based in Northern Iraq, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and with North African cells in Europe.

A $5 million bounty

In a mark of his growing importance, the US government put a $5 million price on his head last October, after the Treasury Department named him as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist." Emphasizing his rising status in jihad circles, Zarqawi issued what appeared to be his first audiotape earlier this month, posting it on the Internet.

In a lengthy tirade against Muslim clerics for not embracing holy war fervently enough, Zarqawi acknowledged the losses his allies have suffered in the US-led war on terror and which seem to have catapulted him to prominence.

"I address you after the approvers and backers [of jihad] have become in short supply, after the wounds have multiplied and the misfortune has worsened, and after many pioneering knights and legendary heroes have passed away," he said on the tape, according to a translation by the US government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

He himself has avoided that fate despite frequent and widespread travel since he first appeared on Western intelligence agencies' radar in 1999.

That year Jordanian authorities tied him to an aborted plot to attack a tourist hotel in Amman over the millennium, for which he was later sentenced in absentia to 15 years' hard labor.

"Initially he was geared to national operations in Jordan ... a prize target for regime change" to Islamic radicals seeking to overthrow pro-Western Middle East monarchs, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St. Andrews' University in Scotland. "But progressively he began acting more internationally, harnessing the diaspora."

In 2000 Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan, where, according to US intelligence, he ran an Al Qaeda training camp that specialized in chemical and biological agents before being wounded in the leg by a US bombing raid during the Afghan war in 2001. He then fled to Iran, and thence to Iraq, where doctors reportedly amputated his leg and fitted him with a prosthetic limb.

It was that visit to Baghdad that prompted US Secretary of State Colin Powell to cite Zarqawi as evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, as he sought to persuade reluctant allies to join Washington in a war to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.

"Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants", Mr. Powell told the UN Security Council last February.

American intelligence officials have said they tracked Zarqawi to a meeting in south Lebanon in August 2002 with Hezbollah leaders, and that he was in Syria in October 2002 when two gunmen assassinated Lawrence Foley, a US diplomat, in Amman.

Those gunmen, arrested soon after the attack, confessed and fingered Zarqawi as the mastermind behind the attack, according to Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu al-Ragheb.

Dangerous liaisons

Zarqawi is thought to have spent time in and around an Ansar-al Islam camp in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq before last year's US-led invasion of Iraq, and then to have fled across the border to western Iran, where he is believed to be living now.

It is Zarqawi's link to new Ansar cells in Europe that are of most concern to European investigators as they probe alleged terror groups from Germany and Italy to France, Britain and Spain.

Two months ago, German police acting on an Italian warrant, arrested Abderrazak Mahdjoub, an Algerian known as "the sheikh" who Italian prosecutors charge was running a clandestine Ansar network that provided money and false papers to recruits from Europe who wanted to go to Iraq to launch attacks on American troops there.

Italian police simultaneously arrested two men in Milan who they say belonged to the same ring, which they had penetrated by using wiretaps on their phones. Zarqawi, Italian prosecutors allege, sometimes used the same satellite phone that other men in northern Iraq used to contact recruits in Italy.

Ansar evolving

The exact nature of Ansar al Islam today is a puzzle, Western intelligence analysts say, since its headquarters was destroyed and its members dispersed by US bombs and then by pro-American Kurdish guerrillas last March. But it appears to have evolved considerably from the overwhelmingly local Kurdish organization that it once was.

Evidence suggesting that the group is still active came last week from the CIA, which gave Norwegian prosecutors the transcripts of e-mails it had intercepted from Mullah Krekar, the Kurdish cleric who founded Ansar, allegedly ordering suicide attacks against US troops in Iraq.

Mr. Krekar was under investigation by the police in Norway, where he was granted asylum in 1991, for his alleged role in the murder of a Kurdish politician in 2002. That investigation has now widened to include his suspected role in directing attacks on American occupation forces in Iraq, his lawyer said this week.

Zarqawi's ties to Al Qaeda are also a matter of debate among European and US intelligence agencies. Where once he appeared to be something of a free agent, he seems recently to have identified himself more closely with Mr. bin Laden.

But "whether Zarqawi swore allegiance to bin Laden makes little difference to whether the two would work together at promoting a common agenda," Mr. Levitt said in recent testimony to Congress. "There is no precise organizational or command structure to the assemblage of groups that fall under Al Qaeda's umbrella. Today's international terrorist groups function ... not as tightly structured hierarchies, but rather as shadowy networks that, when necessary, strike ad hoc tactical alliances bridging religious and ideological schisms."

Clues in the ricin

Zarqawi's apparent role as a nexus between several such networks is of particular concern because of his alleged expertise in chemical and biological agents: Men whom authorities link to him were arrested a year ago in London and Paris in possession of small amounts of ricin, a deadly poison for which there is no antidote.

And though European police have thwarted a number of alleged plots over the past two years, "the fact that no Islamic extremist attack has been committed in the European Union [since October 2002] should not be considered as a diminution or an absence of threat," the EU police agency Europol warned in a report last month.

An Iranian refuge

Even as European investigators continue to pursue his lieutenants, Zarqawi himself seems safe for the time being, intelligence experts say, if he stays in his reported refuge in Iran. "He would be a great feather in the cap of the intelligence community if he were captured," says Dr. Ranstorp. "But he is one part of the great intelligence game, and unless Iran is offered an enormous tangible incentive, I doubt we will see him handed over."





http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1016/p12s01-woiq.html



The rise and fall of Ansar al-Islam

Former members of Ansar al-Islam talk to the Monitor about the militant group's ties to Al Qaeda, the foreign fighters that joined its ranks, and its eventual destruction.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SARGAT AND SULAYMANIYAH, NORTHERN IRAQ – As the American air attack pulverized the mountain base of Ansar al-Islam last March, Mohamed Gharib let his video camera roll - just as he had done during countless operations of the northern Iraq-based militant group.
"I filmed the missiles falling," says Mr. Gharib, a Kurdish militant and the Ansar media chief. Gharib's footage had for years recorded the violent history of the Al Qaeda-linked fighters, and served as a fundraising tool. "You wouldn't believe if I told you we were happy [to be attacked]. They gave us the sense that we were so true, so right, that even America had to come fight us."



Washington fingered Ansar as a terrorist group experimenting with poisons, and used its tenuous links to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to help justify the war against Iraq.

US officials were triumphant last spring, even as the broader Iraq invasion was still underway, after a three-day assault. Gen. Tommy Franks declared that a "massive terrorist facility in northern Iraq" had been "attacked and destroyed" by a joint US-Kurdish operation.

But today US officials assert that Ansar not only survived - like Gharib, who barely escaped after a four-hour bout with a US sniper - but that it is regrouping. They say Ansar is reinfiltrating Iraq with Kurdish and Arab militants from Iran, and, along with Saddam loyalists, is behind an increasing number of anti-US attacks across Iraq.

Lengthy interviews with several Ansar members now in custody, and with officials and intelligence sources of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in northern Iraq, however, yield a more ambiguous picture.

These sources describe a group now so decimated and demoralized that even true believers admit it is unlikely to be reborn according to its old template.

Instead, they say, elements of the group have begun operating in smaller cells. The "Ansar" label today, they add, is also being assumed by Islamic militants of all stripes, and used freely by the US-led coalition, regardless of ties to the original Kurdish group.

But the picture now emerging shows, too, how Washington exaggerated aspects of the threat from the 600 to 800 Ansar members.

Ansar was once part of a long-term Al Qaeda dream to spread Islamic rule from Afghanistan to Kurdistan and beyond. But that idea was embryonic at best, and when US forces attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, Al Qaeda support for Ansar dried up.

And despite the later arrival of some Afghan veterans and Arab fighters - and a new influx of donor cash - Ansar for 1 1/2 years was isolated, manipulated by both Iraq and Iran, and locked in stalemate with far superior Kurdish forces. Its "poison factory" proved primitive; nothing but substances commonly used to kill rodents were found there.

"Don't make Ansar that big - we make them great, and they are nothing, just terrorists," says Dana Ahmed Majid, the PUK security chief. "With the help of Al Qaeda and the support of all Islamic groups, they are trying to rebuild."

But instead of rebuilding a guerrilla force, Kurdish intelligence officials say Ansar is sending out small, freshly activated cells. And instead of just attacking secular Kurdish authorities - the root motivation of Ansar and its predecessor Islamist groups - these cells may be shifting to an anti-US mission, in tandem with Saddam Hussein loyalists.

"Al Qaeda has turned Iraq into a battleground against America," says Barham Salih, prime minister of the PUK area of northern Iraq, who equates Ansar with Al Qaeda. "Ansar was delivered a very big blow. They were not over. Eradication is a long-term process. Everyone is throwing everything into this battle - that's why we must win."

While most estimates cap the number of new foreign fighters that have entered Iraq in the past six months at 1,000, CIA assessments reportedly put the number as high as 3,000. Only a small minority are believed to be tied to Al Qaeda.

In the shadowy world of northern Iraq that clouds fact and fiction, several recent incidents may have Ansar fingerprints:

• Defense officials said Tuesday that in the northern city of Mosul, they captured ranking Ansar leader Aso Hawleri, according to the Associated Press. Kurdish intelligence agents say Mr. Hawleri was one of four Ansar chiefs deployed in early August to set up new networks. Other leaders may have dispersed to Baghdad, hotbed Fallujah, and the southern Shiite city of Najaf.

• A car bomb targeted a US intelligence house in Arbil a month ago, wounding four US military intelligence officers.

• Kurdish security arrested five Ansar-linked militants crossing into Iraq last July: one Tunisian, a Palestinian and three Kurds, who were carrying five fake Italian passports.

• Three Ansar guerrillas - including Afghan-trained Mullah Namou, a senior Ansar figure - were killed in a late August firefight, after reportedly planning to target an internet cafe frequented by US troops.

• Earlier that month, US forces arrested six people in Baghdad they said were Ansar financiers.

Emblematic of the mysterious history and inner workings of Ansar is the experience of holy warriors like Gharib and two others, who were made available at the Monitor's request by the PUK. Questioned separately for more than 13 hours, the former Ansar guerrillas appeared to speak freely. Proud of their handiwork, they also stated their view that Ansar was finished as an organization.

None of the former Ansar members remembers ever seeing or even hearing that Jordan-born Abu Musab Zarqawi was in Sargat, or anywhere else in the small Ansar enclave. Washington accused Mr. Zarqawi - whose leg was amputated in a Baghdad clinic in 2002 - of being Iraq's prewar link with terrorism.

Even today, confusion surrounds Zarqawi's role: Italian investigators reportedly collected phone intercepts that show Zarqawi assisting Ansar. He was reported to have become Al Qaeda's "man in Iraq." But a former Zarqawi operative last year claimed, during multiple interrogations in Germany, that Zarqawi "is against Al Qaeda."

As an Arab speaker in the ethnically Kurdish group, Gharib was transferred in 2001 to Sargat, where Arab fighters were based in their "Ghurba Katiba" (or "Stranger's Unit"). "Even the Arab Afghans who came did not exceed 50 in total, and included people unfamiliar with guns who probably never fired a bullet in their lives," says Gharib.

Despite the broad inexperience, among them were several jihad veterans. A few Kurds were also Afghan war veterans, and proved to be powerful trainers.

Al Qaeda was held up as the model. "This was the sense of everybody, that we were linked to Al Qaeda," says Sangar Mansour, a short, wiry detainee with a youthful face and thin moustache. "[We] looked like Al Qaeda, gave orders like Al Qaeda, trained like Al Qaeda, and used their videotapes" of Afghan operations. "Some non-Kurds had US military uniforms, that they put on when the [US] attacks started," Mr. Mansour says. He saw a worn photograph one of his friends kept under his pillow, of Ansar security chief Ayub Afghani, eating with Osama bin Laden.

Arab militants had begun to trickle into northern Iraq to join the Kurds well before Ansar was officially formed in December 2001. Their presence helped bolster the isolated Kurdish militants.

"Many people grew more committed to this fighting, because they thought: If foreigners are coming here to fight, this must be serious, this must be real," says Diyar Latif Taher, a Kurdish Islamist detainee. He says the number of foreigners never exceeded 90. "They did not say they were members of Al Qaeda, but whenever there was a successful Qaeda operation - an ambush, or hitting a US base in Afghanistan - they were celebrating," says Mr. Taher. Bin Laden was "praised."

"[We] shared the same ideas [with Al Qaeda], and we should be impressed with their leaders, their tactics and their victories, and feel sorry for their losses - otherwise we would not be true believers," says Gharib. "There was this dream of declaring jihad in this part of the world, and kicking out secular authority. And this dream got larger."

But keeping away from the manipulations of local powers was not easy. The Iranians flooded the Ansar area with extremely cheap food supplies, then stopped them abruptly, to squeeze concessions out of Ansar.

Baghdad played a similar role, by using smugglers and middlemen to provide dirt-cheap weapons to Ansar. "Then it stopped - boom! - and you had to beg for it, and make concessions," Gharib says. "I tell you, Ansar was the biggest buyer [from Baghdad]."

So the key to success was funding, especially after Al Qaeda support dried up in late 2001. That's where Gharib's video camera and ability to burn propaganda CDs came in. They showed everything from Koran lessons and road building to training and offensive operations.

"These CDs were extremely important, because they were our income source - we sent them back up the cash chain to donors," Gharib says, holding up his black prayers beads to illustrate the linkages. After one successful attack, funding came "like rain...from everywhere."

"It's not governments, but people from rich countries, Kuwait, Saudi, and Qatar -rich people who would not dare to take part, but sent support to establish Islamic rule," says Gharib. Such donors did not pay for Ansar to "have a truce" with the PUK, but instead demanded action. "There were groups claiming jihad, but just stealing money. So they ask: 'Where is your product? Where is your fighting?' "

So training was serious, under the tutelage of a tough Kurdish Afghan veteran called Ali Wali. "It was unlike any training I had ever seen," says Mansour. "They put down ropes to cross an area, and put sacks of soil on their backs and climbed mountains while avoiding bullets. They used kung fu, and learned how to counter attack with a gun at your back."

"You felt [Mr. Wali] was born to train - they even depended on him in Afghanistan," says Gharib. "Besides weapons, he taught psychological warfare, and dealing with pressure during battle. He was playing with your nerves, until you were able to withstand the pressure."

Later, as US-Kurdish ground forces advanced, Ansar evacuated to Iran. But Ansar's reception was mixed. "The Iranians started to fire at us," says Taher, who speaks Farsi. They finally talked to Revolutionary Guards at the border, handed over their guns, and at 8 a.m. they were driven to the nearest Iranian village. At 10 a.m., they were hustled back.

"An angry official came out and stuck an Iranian flag into the ground," Taher recalls. "This is the border with Iran - don't cross it!" he warned. But his group found a nearby valley, and were taken to a large prison hall in a border town, where they found 100 more militants. They stayed a week, and were each interrogated in front of video cameras by Iranian agents, before being taken back to the border, given back their weapons, and told to "Go, go, go!"

Scores of Ansar militants made it to Iran, and a Kurdish intelligence source working in Biyara - a border town once under Ansar control - alleges that they are being quietly assisted by an unofficial charity called "Daftar Korani." European diplomatic sources in Tehran say that, among hundreds of charities working in Iran, they have never heard of Daftar. "Iran does not officially support them - they don't want to be accused," contends the local PUK source. "Daftar is helping them survive and regroup. Ansar is not allowed to come out [of their safe houses]."

Perhaps more typical of those who didn't surrender is Mansour's experience. His group was also shot at by Iranians during the day last March, but crept across at night. They were rounded up and taken to a regional prison, only to be later released at the border.

Mansour and four friends disappeared back into Iran, and found a local smuggler who was also hosting Ansar leaders Ayub Afghani and Abu Wael (who is widely believed to have been a Baghdad agent in Ansar). The fighters were given the equivalent of $19 and bus tickets to Tehran, told "not to sit together," and instructed how to find a construction job in the Iranian capital.

Ayub Afghani was later arrested by the Iranians, Mansour says, when he was caught with six pistols, fake documents, and several foreign passports. Mansour eventually returned home, and turned himself in to the PUK.

Such has been the fate of the majority of Ansar's original members, say these detained militants, which makes them skeptical that the group can be behind many of the current attacks in Iraq. Gharib estimates that of the 600 Ansar members, some 250 were killed, 50 "were officials who ran away," and the rest have been arrested by the PUK, have given themselves up, or are still in semi-hiding in Iran. "This virtually means that Ansar is over, by the numbers," says Gharib. "Anybody saying these [current attacks] are done by Ansar has no information. They can't do it."


ADAM WEISKIND - STAFF