The joint operation kicked off last Friday against Ansar, a group allegedly linked to Al Qaeda, when nearly 6,000 peshmerga soldiers streamed toward Shinerwe Mountain. Their advance followed a night of relentless bombardment by U.S. aircraft. The attack on the enclave, which held up to 1,000 fighters–some of whom trained in Afghanistan–may act as a blueprint for the military campaign against Saddam Hussein from northern Iraq. There are currently over 1,000 soldiers of the 173rd Airborne in Kurdish territory along with several hundred Special Forces soldiers–not the kind of numbers that would allow a large-scale ground attack. But there are up to 70,000 Kurdish peshmerga, affectionately dubbed the “pesh” by Special Forces soldiers, who could team up with American forces for an offensive on Kirkuk and Mosul. The strategic Iraqi oil cities are both close to the unofficial border separating the Kurdish territory from the rest of the country.
Some Kurdish leaders are pushing for joint action in the north. “A northern front will place significant psychological pressure on Saddam as well as relieve pressure from the troops in the south,” says Hooshyar Zebari, spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the group that controls the western half of the Kurdish region. “We have put our forces under coalition command and the lines are drawn.”
For the United States, choosing Ansar as the first target of a joint operation may have been driven by political motives: Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab Zarqawi established a “poison and explosive training center” in Ansar territory and that Saddam had an intelligence operative working with the group. To build their case, the U.S. military brought in a special investigative team in recent days to pore over the ruins of Ansar bases, which had been pummeled by a week of sporadic bombing, for evidence. “We have found various documents and equipment that would indicate a presence of chemical and biological weapons,” says a Special Forces soldier who was involved in the battle. “Most of the samples that have been taken are being flown back to the States for further study.” Another soldier told NEWSWEEK that the initial investigations had not yielded any conclusive evidence– “no smoking gun” –about the presence of such weapons.
Useful intelligence could also be culled from computers, CDs and other electronic equipment that were removed from the Ansar bases, as well as a couple of fighters, one of whom is a suspected Al Qaeda operative that trained in Afghanistan, who are currently in PUK custody. The Kurds are eager to prove the Al Qaeda link with Ansar. Peshmerga guerrillas proudly showed off the corpse of an Ansar fighter, whom they claimed was a Saudi Arabian member of Al Qaeda, killed in a gun battle this morning.
But the overall effort to net Ansar fighters, particularly non-Kurds, may not have gone as well as planned. Sheikh Jaffar Mustafa, the top PUK military commander in the fight against Ansar, says hundreds of fighters escaped over the mountainous border into Iran. “There is a danger that Ansar will regroup if the Iranians have helped them escape,” he says. The Iranian government has maintained that the border is closed and no assistance has been given to Ansar. Explosions and machine gun fire could still be heard today from the craggy mountain range that divides Kurdish and Iranian territory near the village of Sargat.
For the hundreds of Kurds who evacuated these mountain villages in recent weeks, the removal of Ansar has given them an opportunity to return home. Khadija Ahmad left the region eight days ago because she felt threatened by Ansar. The group imposed strict Islamic codes on the villagers in the region, not unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, and preached global jihad from their mountain redoubt. Today, Ahmad herded her flock of thirty sheep down a dusty road toward Khurmal. “I can go back to my house and live in peace,” she says. “Ansar Al-Islam only brought problems for us.”
