In Brief

• Base: A small area of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq near the border with Iran.  • Size: Estimate of 500 to 700 fighters before March 2003 attack by U.S. and Kurdish forces that scattered and killed many members. Rumored to be regrouping.  • Cause: Declared jihad against secular rule of nothern Iraqi Kurdistan, and also reportedly against U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Might be responsible for some recent attacks on U.S. soldiers.  • Funding: Some intelligence indicates that the group receives support from al Qaeda as well as from the Iraqi and Iranian governments.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the U.S. case for war with Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003, he pointed to Ansar al-Islam, a small extremist Islamist group in Kurdish northern Iraq.  Powell presented evidence for a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network,” explaining that “Baghdad has an agent at the most senior levels of the radical organization [Ansar],” and this individual offered safe haven to Qaeda members in 2000.  Powell also presented satellite photos of an alleged chemical weapons facility operated by Ansar in northern Iraq, and explained that many of the group’s members trained in Afghanistan with al Qaeda.  Defeating Ansar became a priority in the U.S.-led war on Iraq and, soon after the war started, U.S. and Kurdish forces staged an attack on the terrorist group.

The current location of Ansar is hard to pinpoint because the U.S. and Kurdish attack drove the group from its stronghold in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.  Ansar had operated from the region of the Shinirwe Mountain, which overlooks the town of Halabja near the Iranian border.  The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) controls this region of northeastern Iraq, with another Kurdish group – the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) – controlling the northwestern area.  Ansar declared a jihad against the secular rule of the PUK, accusing the group of straying from the true path of Islam.  Much like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ansar imposed strict Islamic rule in the villages it controlled.

An extremist break-off group from the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), Ansar’s members first united in 1991 to aid a Kurdish uprising against Saddam.  In September 2001, several of the more radical Islamic groups in Kurdistan broke off from the IMK and formed Jund al-Islam (“soldiers of Islam”).  Ansar formed a few months later as a successor to Jund al-Islam.  The group’s leader, Islamic cleric, Najmuddin Faraj, also known as Mullah Krekar, has refugee status in Norway where he resides.

Estimations for the number of Ansar members vary from around 500 to 700 fighters.  Two events since the group’s founding have caused the numbers to change significantly, so it is difficult to determine an accurate count.  First, the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 allegedly drove some Qaeda members to northern Iraq to join Ansar after the fall of the Taliban.  Second, the U.S. and Kurdish attack on Ansar in the early part of Operation Iraqi Freedom killed some Ansar members and caused others to scatter. 

The relatively small group of Ansar fighters is an eclectic collection of members from Kurdistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan.  About 10 percent of them are believed to be Arab or Afghan.  The multinational makeup of the organization has fueled suspicions about just who supports the organization, and allegations abound about links to al Qaeda and to both the Iraqi and Iranian governments.

The connections between Ansar, Iraq, and al Qaeda are still unconfirmed, but there is some evidence that the group is allied with bin Laden’s organization.  There are also indications that the group may have been supported by Saddam’s regime.  For example, several Kurdish Islamist leaders reportedly visited the Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan in August 2001, hoping to create an Iraqi base for al Qaeda.  There are also some intelligence reports that al Qaeda then provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund Ansar.  Both Ansar and the Iraqi government deny any links with each other or with al Qaeda, but allegations abound that Saddam secretly supported or ran Ansar, that bin Laden recruited Ansar fighters to train in Afghanistan, and that Ansar invited al Qaeda members in Afghanistan to come to northern Iraq.  Supporters of the U.S.-led war on Iraq hoped to find more evidence of such links to lend legitimacy to the controversial war.

The Iranian government also denies having any ties to Ansar, but Kurdish commanders say that Iran provides the terrorist group with arms, ammunition and a safe haven.  The PUK has a history of good relations with Iran, so the group does not want to directly accuse the Iranians of aiding Ansar.  However – as the Kurdish fighters argue – no one seems to be able to come up with a more viable explanation for the origin of Ansar’s weapons.  The Iranian government’s direct support of the group is questionable, but Iran has allowed them to operate on and cross its borders.

Ansar first made headlines in September of 2001, when members ambushed and killed 42 PUK fighters.  Ansar’s tactics of choice have been suicide bombings, assassinations and raids.  According to some sources, the group was preparing to use suicide bombs on American and British forces entering Kurdistan.  Violence credited to the group include the attempted murder of PUK’s Regional Government Prime Minister Barham Saleh in April 2002, a February 2003 suicide bombing at a military checkpoint in northern Iraq that killed the bomber and three others, and the February 2003 assassination of Gen. Shawkat Haji Mushir, a prominent Kurdish politician.  Ansar is also blamed for the suicide bomb attack that killed Australian journalist Paul Moran, the first journalist killed in the war on Iraq.

U.S. and Kurdish fighters are believed to have cleared Ansar out of its mountain enclave in northern Iraq early in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  However, Kurd intelligence reports that many of the surviving Ansar fighters who fled over the border to Iran have begun to return, and the group is rumored to have declared war against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.  U.S. troops have continued to face guerrilla resistance even after President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1.  Unconfirmed Kurd intelligence reports that some Ansar fighters have been sent to Baghdad to carry out operations against Americans, and Ansar is suspected in some of the recent attacks on U.S. soldiers.  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard B. Myers recently named Ansar al-Islam one of the top five threats to the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Sources

“Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdistan,” Human Rights Watch Press Release, 2003.

Bay Fang, “Northern Iraq’s Other War: Secular Kurds Fight their own Battle Against the Militant Ansar al-Islam,” U.S. News and World Report, March 24, 2003: 134.9.  Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.

Borzou Daragahi, “Kurds warn al-Qaida linked militia may return to northern Iraq,” Associated Press, Napa Valley Register, June 21, 2003.

Elizabeth Rubin, “Second Front,” New Republic, April 7, 2003: 228:13.

Jonathan Schanzer, “Ansar al-Islam: Iraq’s Al-Qaeda Connection,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Jan. 17, 2003.

“Listing of Ansar al-Islam as a Terrorist Organization,” Attorney-General for Australia, March 27, 2003.

“Looking Both Ways: While Punishing al-Qaeda elsewhere, Iran may be helping it in Kurdistan,” The Economist, Aug. 17, 2002: 384.8286.  LexisNexis.

Michael Rubin, “The Afghan Aftermath in the Middle East,” Perceptions Journal of International Affairs,  May-March 2002: 7.1.

Pam O’Toole, “Mullah Denies Iraq al-Qaeda Link, “ BBC, Jan. 31, 2003.

“Powell's Proof,” Transcript of Address to U.N. Security Council, Colin Powell, ABCNews, Feb. 5, 2003. 

Thomas E. Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "In Postwar Iraq, the Battle Widens:  Recent Attacks on U.S. Forces Raise Concerns of a Guerrilla Conflict," The Washington Post, July 7, 2003.