Islamists escalate fight in N. Iraq

"They dreamed of having a Taliban government in Afghanistan, a Taliban government in Kurdistan, and to join them through Iran," says Said.

Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, protected by US and British pilots enforcing a no-fly zone, were also appealing to the Al Qaeda leadership, Said says, because they could often smuggle themselves through Iran without a passport. Afghanistan could be entered the same way, from here. Iran has denied allowing any Al Qaeda members to cross its territory.

"Al Qaeda thought of having another base for themselves outside Afghanistan," says Said. "They failed in Chechnya, so they tried it here, but underground, so it was not known. They chose Kurdistan."

Though that blueprint never came to fruition, Kurdish officials say information from a variety of foreign intelligence agencies point to Kurdistan as being an important part of Al Qaeda's global plan.

"This seems to reveal a broader strategy by Osama bin Laden to seed parts of the Islamic world - where there is no real central control - with Islamist groups," says James Lindsay, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"This is going to be a difficult problem for the US to confront," Mr. Lindsay says. "It suggests that, in any war with Iraq, the easy part may be the war with Baghdad. It will be more difficult to win the peace, because these groups will try to convince people that [the US] are infidels.

"Bin Laden does not put all his money on one horse - he spreads his bets around," Lindsay adds. "But he is sort of the Ford Foundation of terror, takes local groups and forms a beachhead. The problem is that the process of trying to rub it out could make it worse."

That dilemma is now absorbing Kurdish officials. "Every underground group like Al Qaeda has sleeper cells that they will wake when they need them," says Faraidoon Abdulkadir, the PUK minister in charge of internal security. "They don't have sleeper cells here - they have an army."

But Mr. Abdulkadir knows he is not alone in trying to prevent Ansar's next assassination attempt, or an urban artillery attack. "Sometimes to boost my morale, I look at America, which is huge, with all the technology and money and strength," Abdulkadir says. "And still Al Qaeda is there."

That doesn't mean that the PUK is not eager to deal with Ansar. The public was electrified in October 2001, when 42 Kurdish fighters were ambushed by Ansar, and then butchered. Video footage of the carnage, some of which ran on local television stations, sparked disgust. One man on the videotape, walking among the bodies, asks: "Is this terrorism, or the work of Islam?" It was a defining moment that forced Kurds to come to grips with the hard-core militants within their midst.

Kurdish officials liken this current front line to the Tora Bora standoff between Al Qaeda and US forces in Afghanistan late last year. Some say that Ansar has dug into the mountains, and built houses over their cave entrances in some of the 18 villages local commanders say are under Ansar control. "We can only fight Ansar from the sky, just as America fought the Taliban from the sky," says a senior Kurdish official. "This kind of work can't be done just with machine guns."

But several officials suggest that Ansar can be crushed handily with Iranian help, or even if Iran allowed the PUK - with which it has close ties - to temporarily enter Iranian territory and attack from behind. "If Iran helps the PUK to cross the border, the PUK can get rid of 80 percent of them," says defector Said. "If Iran engages itself, it would be a big victory. And if the US Air Force comes, I will not give them days, but hours. Ansar is not prepared for air attack."

The massacre of the Kurdish fighters in Oct. 2001 was the event that "made everything clear to me," says the defector. "Now I believe [Ansar] made many mistakes, that are not part of Islam.

"My thoughts and ideas have now changed," says Said, quietly. "If they did not, I would not be talking to you."

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