Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq — Four Kurds and an Australian journalist were killed Saturday by a suicide bomber from the radical Islamist organization Ansar al-Islam outside the northeastern Iraqi city of Halabja.
Ansar, a splinter group of extremists, has been linked by the U.S. to al-Qaeda and accused of acting as the channel between the terrorist organization and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. It has waged a low-level war with the Kurdish government since its creation in 2000, and its 700 fighters are believed to include 200 Arabs and Afghans who trained with al-Qaeda.
On Friday night, the U.S. bombarded Ansar positions with an estimated 45 Tomahawk missiles from ships in the Red. At 8 o'clock this morning, there was further bombing by U.S. planes, in the mountains bordering Iran and Iraq.
Mustafa Said Qader, deputy commander of the Kurdish forces, or
peshmerga, said that 100 members of Qomoleh al-Islamiyya, an extremist Muslim organization that cooperates with the Kurdish government, were killed in the air strikes, and that an unknown number of Ansar members were also killed and wounded. The
peshmerga did not advance on Ansar positions today — awaiting further air strikes, the commander said — so the reports of casualties were impossible to confirm.
The retaliation came sooner than anyone anticipated: at 3 p.m., a man in his mid-30s driving a white Toyota sedan approached a checkpoint on the main road between the Kurdish government-controlled city of Halabja and Khormal, the last town before Ansar territory.
Peshmerga at the checkpoint say he slowed at the intersection but did not stop and that the Australian journalist — Paul Moran, 39 — was filming the car when it blew up.
The blast destroyed the car — only the rear wheels were left, ablaze — and a row of shops. Two
peshmerga, and two Kurdish civilians seeking information about family members in the areas hit by missiles, were killed.
The slain journalist, who was married with a two-year-old child and was freelancing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, died instantly. He is the first reporter to die covering this conflict. Two other foreign reporters working with him were injured, as were 23 Kurds.
“I saw people falling, I saw pieces of the car falling from the sky, I saw blood spreading,” said Fathi Abdullah, a young
peshmerga who brought his badly-wounded friend to the Halabja hospital in the manure-caked flatbed of a commandeered truck normally used for sheep.
Mr. Qader said the Ansar casulaties had been evacuated to Iran (which has supported the group).
The Kurds were clearly delighted that their struggle with Ansar had finally won U.S. aid, but the Islamist organization, although no doubt weakened, still retains control of its territory. Mr. Qader said he thought Ansar would be wiped out within a week.
“The enemy forces were killed and injured, their military stores were exploded, their morale and courage was lowered.”
However, the fact that the bombing produced so many casualties among Qomoleh creates a new problem for the Kurdish government. The group had earned a reputation as the “less bad extremists” locally, acting as an intermediary between Ansar (who have established a Taliban-like regime in the 18 villages it controls) and the government.
But Qomoleh has an estimated 3,000 armed men of its own, men who will now likely be seeking bloody revenge for the air strikes.
