Kurdistan Observer

WASHINGTON Brent Scowcroft and his leave-Saddam-alone acolytes on the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board insist that "there is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations." But here are two names of intense current interest to American counterterror agents:

One is Fowzi Saad Obeidi, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Under the name Abu Zubair, Saad headed a force of 120 Arab terrorists backed by about 400 renegade Kurds who were remnants of a defeated separatist group.

Their "Supporters of Islam" organization was sent by Saddam into the portion of northern Iraq under U.S. aerial protection to assassinate the democratic Kurdish leadership and to establish crude chemical warfare facilities in villages near the Iranian border.

The other name is of a senior Al Qaeda commander, Abu Omer Kurdi. Known at Qaeda headquarters in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, by the name Rafid Fatah, this aide to Osama bin Laden helped train many of these infiltrators and accompanied them on their mission.

Several of their attempts to kill the Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani or their deputies late last year, with the latest strike at a top aide just last week, were bloodily repulsed, with a score of the terrorists captured - including the Saddam agent, Saad, and the Qaeda operative, Kurdi.

However, the terrorist mission to set up facilities to weaponize poisons in Iraqi Kurdistan has been more successful. One produces a form of cyanide cream that kills on contact. A shipment of this rudimentary panic-spreader, produced by what interrogators say is a Qaeda-Saddam joint venture, was recently intercepted in Turkey on its way to terror cells in the West. These chemicals are not weapons of mass destruction, but for individuals who touch it - 'tis enough, 'twill do.

Such verification of data obtained from the captured terrorists awakened CIA bureaucrats who for nearly a year waved reporters away from evidence of Qaeda-Iraqi links lest it justify U.S. action. Belatedly, a CIA team interrogated some of the terrorists held in northern Iraq - comparing what they found with information gleaned from Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

Even religiously motivated terrorists crack in dismay at how much their CIA interrogator already knows. When added to prisoners' family details provided by Kurdish sources, the scope of U.S. knowledge led captives in Kurdistan to talk about poison production and Iraqi links because they figured there was little left to hide.

The new information has changed much intelligence analysis. The CIA has even stopped discrediting reports from Czech intelligence about a different point of Qaeda-Saddam contact: the meeting between a Sept. 11 hijackers' leader, Mohamed Atta, and a top Saddam spymaster in Prague.

But the new evidence of Saddam's close connection with terrorists seeking to kill Kurds under American air protection and to export crude poison weaponry poses an immediate operational problem: Should the United States send in special forces to find and root out the hidden facilities near the Iraq-Iran border? The answer, apparently, is, "Not now." Why? For the same reason America has not sent anti-tank weapons and gas masks to the 70,000 Kurdish fighters eager to join an American effort to topple the Iraqi dictator: It might provide a provocation for Saddam to take out the lightly armed Kurds before America has forces in place to launch a coordinated assault, probably early next year.

Let's not pretend we must "make the case" that Saddam personally directed the events of Sept. 11. The need to strike at an aggressive despot before he gains the power to blackmail the United States with the horrific weapons he is building and hiding is apparent to most Americans, including those who will bear the brunt of the fight.

But it would make sense for him to use his new weaponry through terrorist cutouts. That is why it is worthwhile to discover and expose the likelihood of Saddam's previous and present connections to mass murder.

That is why people who oppose the finishing of this fight - on strategic, self-justifying, political or pacifist grounds - should open their minds to the signs that terror's most dangerous supporter can be found in Baghdad.

The New York Times