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KurdistanObserver.com
Along border, Kurds Say, Iran Gives Boost To
Uprising
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe
Staff | November 7, 2004
Boston Globe
TUWELLA, Iraq -- A dirt track winds from this
Kurdish border outpost to the top of a jagged mountain ridge separating Iran
from Iraq's northern Kurdish enclave.
For years, and with the blessing of Iranian
officials, Islamist terrorist groups have smuggled weapons and money into Iraq
on this road, many Kurdish intelligence and security officials said. When US
special forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters attacked Ansar al-Islam, an Al
Qaeda affiliate, in March 2003, hundreds of its members fled to Iran, the
officials said, and have regrouped in several towns just over this border.
There, they continue to train, raise funds, and
plan terrorist operations in Iraq, infiltrating operatives across a porous,
rocky, high-altitude border that has long been a haven for smugglers and that,
in practical terms, is impossible to police, the Kurdish officials say.
Iraqi and US officials have grumbled for more
than a year about what they perceive as Iranian interference in Iraq. Iran has
repeatedly and forcefully denied any such interference.
But here in the mountains of Kurdistan, the
Kurdish officials point to what they say are tangible footprints of Iran's
collaboration with terror and insurgent groups responsible for attacks inside
Iraq.
According to a half-dozen officials in the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, known as the PUK, which controls the southern half
of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and commanders in the peshmerga, the force that
provides security in the region, Iran has extended its network of agents inside
Iraq.
Iran, the officials say, continues to aid
groups like Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, now named Al Qaeda
in Mesopotamia.
Even though Iran is a Shi'ite theocracy, these
officials said, it helps Sunni insurgent groups because it wants to prevent a
strong unified government from taking shape in Iraq.
"They go back and forth after running missions
here," said Anwar Haji Othman, head of security in the area around Halabja,
including a long stretch of the Iranian border. "They bring cash from Iran to
Iraq across the border."
Iran denies supporting Iraqi insurgents, and
has declared its support for a peaceful, democratic Iraq. Tehran has argued that
an unstable, violent neighbor would undermine Iran's security.
Iraqi and Iranian officials have met
repeatedly, and have pledged to work closely on security matters.
At Iraq's request, Iran stopped tens of
thousands of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims who were flooding across the border to
visit Iraq's shrine cities -- and bringing with them crime, infiltrators, and
drug dealers, some Iraqi officials say.
Tensions have flared publicly. This summer, in
widely repeated comments, the Iraqi defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, called Iran
his country's "first enemy," and said Tehran's policies had "added fuel to the
fire."
American officials have warned Iran against
interfering in its neighbors affairs, but have sent mixed signals about whether
they believe Iran's government is helping insurgents. Many top officials,
including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell, have called Iran's activities unhelpful, but General John Abizaid
emphasized in April that "there are elements within Iran that are urging
patience."
Tehran has said it does not allow militants to
cross the border, but Iranian officials have not ruled out that Islamic fighters
might be moving illegally from Iran to Iraq.
Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said
at the time: "From the outset, Iran has tried to help Iraq overcome its
problems."
But Othman, the Kurdish regional security
chief, said that despite impressive internal security forces, Iran has not
stopped terror groups from living and training just across the border in a group
of Iranian Kurdish cities.
Othman said that Kurdish forces had arrested
many members of Ansar al-Islam, including three top leaders over the last six
months. Ansar al-Islam operated for two years in a cluster of villages between
Halabja and Tuwella. The US government identified Ansar as a terrorist group,
and believes it sheltered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for two months before the US
invasion in 2003.
According to Othman and other intelligence
officials, Ansar's members have reconstituted as a new group, Ansar al-Sunni, or
have joined Zarqawi. US officials have made the same claim.
According to information gleaned from
questioning of the arrested Ansar members, Othman said, former Ansar fighters
are now based in the Iranian border towns of Marivan (home to about 60 Kurdish
Islamists), Sanandaj, Dezli (where about 30 Iranian villagers have joined the
Islamist cause) and Orumiyeh (the base for up to 300 Islamists, including Gulf
Arabs, Afghans and Kurds). They have a training camp in Dolanau, just a few
kilometers from the Iraqi border. Three other leading officials have confirmed
this.
"Iran continues its relationship with Ansar,"
Othman said. "They are training them how to use explosive ordnance for terrorist
attacks in the south of Iraq."
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan controls the
half of the region that includes the major cities of Suleimaniya and Halabja,
where three powerful groups held territory from 2001 to 2003.
Its security and intelligence arm, the Asaish,
has offices across Iraq, including Mosul, Baghdad, and Baquba, and has sources
in centers including Fallujah, said the agency's leader, Dana Ahmed Majid. The
Asaish has operated as an independent agency for more than a decade, and has
worked closely with US intelligence.
Mohammed Mohammed Saeed, a peshmerga commander
and the top PUK official in the region around Halabja, said that Iran regularly
sends intelligence agents into Kurdistan to monitor the Kurdish peshmerga and
the movements of Americans.
Iran used to have offices in Suleimaniya and
Halabja until US special forces landed in the region in March 2003. But, Saeed
said, the Iranians have retained their spy network inside Iraq, and are now
using it to watch American forces and to help insurgents.
"The Iranians are worried," he said. "They
don't want a pro-American government in Iraq. The Iranians want neighboring
countries to be full of anarchy, violence, and chaos."
When Iran still operated openly in Kurdistan,
Saeed said, locals bribed Iranian officials with television sets to get visas.
The PUK, he said, paid the Iranians to restrain the Islamist forces that
controlled the valley stretching from Halabja to Iran. There, one group, Komala,
or the Islamic Group, led by Ali Bapir, controlled the town of Khurmal. Ansar
al-Islam controlled Biyara, and a third allied group, called the Islamic
Movement, held Tuwella.
One Kurdish official in Tuwella, named Tahir
Mustafa Ali, said the three groups should be viewed as "three wings of the same
bird." Ali added that the terror groups responsible for much of the killing,
hostage-taking, and bombing in Iraq, despite their different names, should
similarly be viewed as part of a single network.
Iran has deep ties with many of the Iraqis who
suffered under Saddam Hussein's leadership. They sheltered Kurds when Hussein
attacked them with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and in the south they
sheltered Shi'ites who were fleeing retribution for the 1991 uprising.
And the Kurds and Shi'ites, among others, who
have not secured their future in a post-Hussein Iraq, hesitate to repudiate
their erstwhile ally to the west.
"They have been a friend to us," Saeed said.
"We do not want to have any problem with Iran."
Daily, about 50 truckloads of legal imports
stream into Iraq through this tiny border crossing above Tuwella, carrying
cement and soft drinks. The illegal trade is just as important; Iraqi smugglers
openly drive by the Iranian checkpoint and, farther down a dirt track, carry
goods across the border on foot or by donkey.
At the border post last week, Iranian soldiers
-- under the watchful eye of a Revolutionary Guard officer -- refused to speak
to a reporter. "The intelligence will punish us if we talk to you," one said
with a smile.
Down the dirt track, in the town of Tuwella,
the local PUK chief, Ismail Ameen, said he kept his PUK membership a secret
during the two years that Islamists ruled Tuwella. Just before the war, in
February 2003, he saw six gray
Toyota Landcruisers drive into town from the
Iranian border. He said the trucks were loaded with bullets and mortar shells
for Islamic Movement fighters.
"They would have run out of ammunition . . .
without the supplies they got from Iran," he said.
Two top PUK security officials, and three
members of the PUK's political bureau, also contended that Iran has continued to
support Islamist insurgents.
Majid, head of the PUK's security agency, said
that one former Ansar leader, Omar Baziani, had been caught by US forces in
Baghdad six months earlier. Through interrogations, authorities heard that
Baziani had crossed the border from Iran, Majid said, and had met with Zarqawi
in Fallujah.
"It's easy to cross the Iranian border," Majid
said. He added that the presence of Islamist terrorists in Iran, and their
apparent ease in moving between the two countries, did not prove that Iran was
sponsoring the groups.
According to the Kurdish officials, four former
Ansar leaders have been arrested in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and the border town of
Penjwin in the past six months. All four are believed to have been planning or
supervising attacks.
There's a long history in the area of nations
giving shelter to their enemies' enemies.
In Iraq, Hussein funded the cult-like Iranian
opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalk.
In Iran, shelter was given to an array of Iraqi
opposition groups, ranging from those considered allied with Tehran's ideology,
like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to the secular Iraqi
National Congress.
The apparent Iranian ties to mujahedeen groups
operating inside Iraq only continues this long Machiavellian tradition, the
Kurdish officials said.
"They work with groups like Ansar, whose
ideology is so opposed to theirs, because they want to have a card to play in
Iraq," Saeed said. |
