Authors: Jason Burke
Mullah Uthman Ali Aziz’s own personal connections with the Iranian mullahs were close. Drawing heavily on Qutb and Khomeini, he believed that a free Kurdish state needed to be run according to the Shariat. He also believed that violent means were justified in attaining that aim. The Kurdish opposition movement to Saddam Hussein was, as it still is, dominated by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Both were heavily influenced by Soviet ideology – and received Soviet assistance – during the Cold War.
In the late 1980s, several senior Kurdish Islamic activists travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. They included many of the future leaders of the radical Islamic movement in Kurdistan. Most were graduates from technical faculties in the newly expanded Iraqi universities and came from recently urbanized families and thus fit the classic profile of political Islamic activists in this period. One, Najmuddin Feraj Ahmed, known as Mullah Krekar, established a guesthouse for Kurdish mujahideen in Peshawar and, until 1991, taught modern science at the Islamic University in Islamabad where he became close to Abdallah Azzam.
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The uprising against Saddam Hussein’s regime in the wake of the Gulf War in 1991 allowed the Kurdish Islamists to come out into the open without fear of repression for the first time. In the elections for a Kurdish government following the uprising, the IMK failed to gain the 7 per cent minimum they needed for representation in the new
parliament. However, their failure in the polls did not reflect the IMK’s growing popularity among young urban Kurds. Between 1991 and 1996, when UN Security Council resolution 986 allowing Iraqi oil to be traded for food was passed, the economic situation in the Kurdish enclave was appalling. Inhabitants had effectively suffered two sets of sanctions: those imposed on Iraq by the UN and those imposed on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein. The secular parties’ lack of funds for basic social services necessitated substantial foreign assistance. As Western NGOs moved in so too did a raft of Islamic relief organizations, funded by the Saudi government, Saudi private donors and other wealthy Gulf patrons. Islamic religious leaders throughout the Middle East had viewed the influx of the Western NGOs as a threat to the Islamic faith of the Kurds and had called for strong measures by Islamic governments and private individuals to counter it. A series of Gulf-based Wahhabi organizations, including the International Islamic Relief Organization, opened branches in Kurdistan. Their aims were explicit and they were brazen about linking the distribution of aid to proselytization.
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Aid to orphans and widows was made contingent on attendance at the mosque and at Qur’anic study groups and the wearing of the veil. For a student to receive a subsidy, free food or a room in a free dormitory, his whole family had to abide by strict rules.
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In the hundreds of mosques built by the groups, the mullahs were paid according to how many converts to Wahhabism they made.
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The charities even offered bounties to anyone prepared to give up membership of secular political parties.
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Subsidized Wahhabi literature was widely disseminated. For many older Kurds and established ulema, the expansion of radical modern Islam was a shock.
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The result of the charities’ activities, coupled with the continued failure of the warring secular parties to solve Kurdistan’s profound social and economic problems, was a surge in recruitment to the IMK. By 1993, the IMK had established offices throughout Kurdistan and was growing in confidence. There were growing tensions within the movement as the men returning from Afghanistan began to steer the Islamic movement in Kurdistan in a more radical direction, as their counterparts had done in Algeria and elsewhere. Krekar returned to Kurdistan in 1991, forming his own independent Islah (‘reform’) group
a year later and explicitly rejecting any accommodation with the secular government.
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A series of explosions, assassination attempts and attacks on ‘immodest’ women convinced the new Kurdish administrations (the Kurdish enclave had split into discrete PUK and KDP sectors by 1992) to launch a crackdown. There was widespread fighting until, under pressure from Iran, a truce was brokered under which the IMK would be given the posts of mayor and chief of police in the eastern town of Halabja in return for forgoing the armed struggle.
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Despite continuing internecine conflict, the economic situation was vastly improved by the UN’s decision to allow Iraq to sell oil and the international community’s determination to see that a significant proportion of the funds made through the oil sales went to the de facto government of Kurdistan, not just to the regime of Saddam Hussein. The impact was immediate and allowed the secular parties to counter the activities of the Islamic charities. Recruitment to the IMK dropped away sharply and moderates within the movement were satisfied when the IMK were given a ministry in 1996.
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But a year later the PUK and various breakaway elements from within the IMK clashed again. The fighting was led by a group commanded by a 35-year-old Islamic activist known as ‘Mullah Aso’ who had returned from Afghanistan a year previously. Again echoing developments in Algeria, he took the view that everyone other than themselves was takfir and, with several hundred fighters, occupied a handful of villages in the hills above Halabja.
Between 1998 and 2000, individual militants in Iraqi Kurdistan had made their way to Afghanistan. One of the letters I had picked up in Khost, addressed to Sayyid al-Kurdi, written in Arabic and dated 27 October 1997, had been sent by ‘Abu Yakub’ from Kurdistan. It thanked him for his tuition.
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A second letter to the instructor was undated but had been signed ‘Abu Ziad al-Kurdi’. The writer was apologetic. ‘We did not set up a group as you asked,’ he says.
Early in 2001, three groups within the IMK had broken away to form a separate organization called the Ansar ul Islam. Ansar ul Islam comprised Mullah Krekar’s Islah, a second group called the Markaz-i-Islami (Islamic Centre) and a third known as Hamas al-Tauhid. However, the unity of the groups was an illusion. Shortly after
the formation of Ansar ul Islam, two of the three constituent groups separately sent representatives to Afghanistan to contact bin Laden. Krekar, who had had no contact with the Saudi or any of his associates previously, sent a three-man delegation after contacting Kurds who had been in Afghanistan with bin Laden for some years, possibly including Sayyid al-Kurdi who introduced them to Mohammed Atef who sent the three men to a camp near Jalalabad, probably Darunta, where they received training in the now familiar curriculum. Because the al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan knew of Krekar’s history during the Afghan war and of his role in the fighting that had been going on in Kurdistan in the previous decade, the delegation from his group was allowed, as Raeed Hijazi had been, to skip the basic infantry training and move straight on to the more advanced terrorist techniques that Krekar had asked them to learn.
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Before the three Islah men had returned to Kurdistan, another small group, from Hamas (al-Tauhid), arrived. They had made an approach to bin Laden through Abu Qutada, the London-based cleric. Qutada had wired them money and told them to go to Tehran to meet a contact who in mid March 2001 passed them on to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan where they made their request for training and funds in person to al-Zawahiri.
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Once two of the three groups that constituted Ansar ul Islam had visited Afghanistan, bin Laden, or perhaps al-Zawahiri or Atef, saw an opportunity. Within weeks, an Arab veteran of the Afghan war called Abu Abdullah al-Shami had been sent from Jordan to make contact with the third hardline group in Kurdistan, the Markaz-i-Islami, the only one that had not yet approached the al-Qaeda leadership with a request for training or financial support.
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The Markaz proved enthusiastic and, following bin Laden’s approach and offer, a delegation set off through Iran to Afghanistan where they met al-Zawahiri. On their return several weeks later, the three men were arrested by the Iranian police with video recordings of the lectures that they, and Mullah Krekar’s men, had received in the training camps loaded onto CD-ROMs. The IMK leadership used their contacts in Tehran to secure their release and by June all the various delegations were back in Kurdistan. In late August, Markaz and Hamas (al-Tauhid)
joined forces and decided to call themselves Jund-ul-Islam and, on 1 September, issued the call to Jihad. The agreement was brokered by al-Shami, bin Laden’s representative, who had returned to Kurdistan with the Markaz group.
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It took al-Shami until December 2001, however, to convince Krekar to join the group. When he did, the new formation called itself Ansar ul Islam (again) and launched a wave of violent attacks, supervised by al-Shami, on the PUK and other targets. The ferocity of the attacks, which included the ritual butchering of Peshmerga prisoners and suicide bombings against government offices, was unprecedented.
In August 1999, well before any of the Kurds, Mohammed Khalim bin Jaffar, a slight 36-year-old printer from Singapore, arrived in Afghanistan and sought out Mohammed Atef. He had come on behalf of a group of Islamic militants in the island state who were, like so many others, seeking practical help in launching a bomb attack on American interests. Khalim’s associates had even gone to the trouble of preparing a video of their projected targets. The video, which was later found in the rubble of Atef’s Kabul office after an American airstrike, shows images of a regular shuttle service in Singapore conveying US military and diplomatic personnel between two railway stations. A voiceover explains how an attack could work and how much damage it would do. Atef does not appear to have been too impressed with the presentation as there is no evidence that Khalim, who stayed for nine months in Afghanistan, returned to Singapore with any funding.
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The history of radical Islamism in southeast Asia is complex and any attempt to condense its complexities and myriad variations risks over-simplification. However, there are certain elements in the origins of the group that hoped to launch the attacks in Singapore that are worth highlighting. The coincidence with other groups, as far away as Uzbekistan and Algeria, is interesting. Once more the key role of states in fomenting extremism by sheltering radicals for short-term political gain is clear.
Though based in Malaysia, the roots of the plot lie in Indonesia. Indonesia, and southeast Asia in general, is far from a terrorist hotbed. Of Indonesia’s 220 million people, 85 per cent are Muslim and follow
a very moderate form of Islam heavily influenced by Sufism and the area’s strong Hindu traditions. Islam arrived from the Middle East through the spice trade. Proponents of radical ‘modernist Islam’, as it is known locally, are a small, if a growing, minority. Those who believe in using violence to achieve their aims of a ‘Jemaa Islamiyya’ are rarer still.
In Indonesia, the more radical movements have their roots in the struggle for independence against Dutch colonialists. Successive governments have used Islamist groups to counter Communist and democratic opposition. When out of favour, Islamist groups have been viciously repressed. It was one such bout of repression that drove leading Indonesian Islamic activists into exile, a hijra, in Malaysia in 1985. Several of them subsequently travelled to Afghanistan and returned to Malaysia full of jihadi Salafist ideas that they hoped to apply to their own environments.
One such man was Riduan Isamuddin, currently known as ‘Hambali’. He was born in 1966 in a small village in rural west Java, attended an Islamic school and college and became involved in the Islamist movement based on the religious school near the city of Solo that was run by the cleric Abu Bakar Ba’asir. He fled to Malaysia with Ba’asir in 1985 and spent two years in Afghanistan, returning in 1990.
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By 1991, he was living in a compound with other migrant workers in a small village south of Kuala Lumpur. Hambali told his landlord that he had fled Indonesia to be able to ‘practise Islam more freely’. Though virtually destitute on his arrival, he appears to have prospered and in late 1993 or early 1994 opened an export company with one of Ramzi Yousef’s co-conspirators which police now say was used to channel funds to the Philippines for the so-called ‘Bojinka plot’. He is also reported to have met Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
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Hambali can be considered one of those experienced militants, active after the end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, who became a vanguard of radical activists. Hambali did not go to Afghanistan to join bin Laden. The lax security environment in southeast Asia may have meant he had no need to physically base himself there.
During the 1990s, Hambali and Ba’asir preached their brand of
radical Islam in prayer meetings, mosques and Qur’anic study groups, focusing, as most political Islamist groups historically had done, on lower middle-class, frustrated white-collar workers in medium-sized rural towns,
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though he did facilitate the travel of many of his new supporters to Afghanistan. By the late 1990s, he appears to have organized around twenty recruits from Singapore into several cells. They included several full- or part-time policemen and at least eight full- or part-time servicemen with the Singaporean armed forces. By 1997, they had begun reconnaissance of a variety of American or Western European targets and in 1999 despatched Khalim with his tape to Afghanistan in an attempt to raise funding. As mentioned, Khalim returned from Afghanistan to Singapore in April 2000 empty-handed and the plan to attack the shuttle bus and the railway stations was temporarily shelved.