Ansar al-Islam

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Ansar al-Islam (Arabic: انصار الاسلام, Supporters or Partisans of Islam) is a Kurdish Sunni Islamist group, promoting a radical interpretation of Islam and holy war. At the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq it controlled about a dozen villages and a range of peaks in northern Iraq on the Iranian border. It has used terrorist tactics such as sucide bombers in its conflicts with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and other Kurdish groups.

1 Origins
2 Operations after the invasion
3 References
4 Online Video

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Origins

Ansar al-Islam was formed in December 2001 as a merger of Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam), led by Abu Abdallah al-Shafi'i, and a splinter group from the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan led by Mullah Krekar. Krekar became the leader of the merged Ansar al-Islam, which opposed an agreement made betwen IMK and the dominant Kurdish group in the area, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Ansar al-Islam fortified a number of villages along the Iranian border, with Iranian artillery support. The local villagers were subjected to harsh sharia laws; musical instruments were destroyed and singing forbidden. The only school for girls in the area was destroyed, and all pictures of women removed from merchandise labels. Sufi shrines were desecrated and members of the Kakkai (a non-moslem Kurdish religious group) were forced to convert to islam or flee.

Ansar al-Islam quickly initiated a number of attacks on the peshmerga (armed forces) of the PUK, on one occasion massacring 53 prisoners and beheading them. Several assassination attempts on leading PUK-politicians were also made with carbombs and snipers.

Ansar al-Islam comprised about 300 armed men, many of these veterans from the Afghan war, and a proportion being neither Kurd nor Arab. Ansar al-Islam is alleged to be connected to the al-Qaeda, and provided an entry point for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other Afghan veterans to enter Iraq.

According to the United States, they had established facilities for the production of poisons, including ricin. The US also claimed that Ansar al-Islam had links with Saddam Hussein, thus claiming a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Mullah Krekar denied this claim, and declared his hostility to Saddam [1]. The Ansar al-Islam did, however, never engage Baathist forces, and local Kurds largely accept the link to Hussein.

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Operations after the invasion

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it gave air support to a PUK-attack on the Ansar al-Islam enclave, which did not draw Iranian artillery fire. The Ansar al-Islam peshmerga escaped into Iran, where they were disarmed but not arrested. Many have since returned to Iraq and joined various armed groups fighting the occupation.

Ansar al-Islam detonated a suicide car bomb on March 22, 2003, killing an Australian journalist and several others. The group is also thought to have been responsible for an September 9, 2003 attempted bombing of a United States Department of Defense office in Arbil, which killed three people.

On February 1, 2004 suicide bombings hit parallel ID-celebrations arranged by the two main Kurdish parties, PUK and KDP, in the Kurdish capital of Arbil, killing 109 and wounding more than 200 partygoers. Responsibility for this attack was claimed by the then unknown group Ansar al-Sunnah, and stated to be in support of "our brothers in Ansar al-islam."

Ansar al-islam is thought not to be active in Iraq at present, but has an extensive network in Europe organizing finace and support for armed attacks within Iraq. Several members of such groups have been arrested in European countries such as Germany and Sweden.

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