The Americans insist that Al-Qa'eda and Ansar Al-Islam are now the main "strategic" threat facing Iraq. Graham Usher went to the mountains on the Iran-Iraq border where Ansar was born The stone and mud-walled houses cling like leeches to a mountain pass. On the grassy plain sweeping before them lies the debris of a destroyed Kurdish village, one of the 3,000 razed by the Iraqi army during Saddam Hussein's 1988 Anfal campaign. Above them yawns the blackened mouth of a cave. The village is Sargat. The mountain marks the Iraq-Iranian border. And the cave was once the military headquarters of Ansar Al- Islam, a radical Kurdish Islamist movement and -- insist the Americans -- the missing link that binds Saddam Hussein, Al-Qa'eda and Iran together. On 27 and 28 April last year US Special Forces and Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas ousted Ansar from its mountain emirate. Amina Mohammed Othman -- a Kurdish journalist -- was among the first to see the aftermath. "The Ansar men were lying dead in the field. They were completely black -- black clothes with black paint to cover their faces and hands. Beside them were syringes. I don't know what for. A doctor said it might be to inject themselves with painkillers so that they could continue fighting after they had been hit". In its own small way Ansar Al-Islam mirrors the vicissitudes of political Islam throughout the Muslim world. Its peculiar origins are a resurgent Kurdish Islamism, enabled by the withdrawal of the Iraqi army from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and stoked by the civil war that then filled the vacuum, when the main Kurdish nationalist parties -- the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- fought murderously and uselessly over the spoils of their "autonomy". When that war dimmed, the Islamists fought their own: with the "moderates" linked up with the nationalists and the "radicals" finding sanctuary in a string of villages that thread the Iran-Iraqi border. Other radicals -- Arab as well as Kurdish -- joined them there, returning "home" from the loss of Afghanistan, their passage almost certainly facilitated by Iran and perhaps by Saddam Hussein. This was how Ansar Al-Islam was born, in around December 2001 -- three months after the airliners ploughed into New York and Washington, one month after the US army drove the Taliban from Kabul. Ansar's leader was Mullah Krekar, now under arrest in the Norway. He denies any link with Al-Qa'eda but has praised Osama Bin Laden as "a good Muslim". In any case his targets were home grown. Ansar guerrillas fought and won a series of battles with the PUK to preserve their caliphate in the mountains and in February 2001 assassinated Franso Hariri, the governor of the Kurdish city of Irbil, as a harbinger of their kingdom to come: "to bring down the Iraqi regime [including, apparently, the Kurdish regional government] and replace it with an Islamic regime", said Krekar. Until April 2003, around 1500 people in ten villages lived by Ansar's light. Barham Rahouf -- a teacher in Sargat -- describes the experience: "They would refuse women to leave their homes without the veil. They banned all satellite dishes, parties where men and women mixed, and music. They told people these were the rules and that we must obey them." He shrugs his shoulders. "We did so of course. We knew they could do whatever they liked". Are they still in the mountains? "I don't think so -- we haven't seen a stranger [Kurd] or foreigner [non-Iraqi Arab] since the Americans attacked their base." Gone but not vanquished -- or so says the US and Kurdish leadership. In December or January the peshmerga arrested Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani national. He confessed to be conveying a letter from Abu Musab Zarqawi to the Al-Qa'eda leadership abroad. Zarqawi was in the mountains with Ansar Al-Islam when its base was attacked, say the Americans. The letter calls on its recipients to help ferment a "war" between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Muslim Arabs "since this is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us". Lamenting that Iraq has "no mountains in which to seek refuge", it decries the Kurds as "a pain and a thorn", vowing to "get some of their leaders". On 1 February dual suicide attacks hit the Irbil offices of the KDP and PUK, leaving over 100 dead, including several senior Kurdish leaders. It was the work of Ansar Al-Islam and Al-Qa'eda, and a confirmation of the strategy outlined in the Zarqawi letter, says Hoshyar Zobari, KDP member and Iraq's interim foreign minister. "Irbil was a signal to the Kurdish leadership from international terrorist networks outside the country that we have cast our lot with the infidels, the Christians, the Jews and the Crusaders, and that we must be eliminated. Their goals are strategic. They want to sink the American project here in the Iraqi mud. After they lost their base in Afghanistan, they believe the northern areas are the suitable place to operate from. It will bring them closer to the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina". Maybe -- but a trek through the villages that Ansar Al-Islam once ruled suggests Zobari and the Americans vision may be overly apocalyptic. Broken by poverty, abandoned by their governments -- whether Arab or Kurdish -- and cast on a terrain where neighbouring countries have long fought their wars by proxy, Ansar's nihilistic ideology may be more easily explained by the circumstances of its birth: that of a failed state and failing nationalisms and the terrible violence inflicted by both. For the blackened men who sought life and found death in Sargat, Al-Qa'eda may be less an organisation than an idea, a spark to light the moral and political void that had long raged within them. That is perhaps how it was in Algeria and Afghanistan. That is how it may be, again, in Iraq.
