BAGHDAD: The Kurds of Iraq are girding for war. Guerrillas, known as peshmergas, are working day and night hauling sandbags, digging trenches and bulldozing mountain roads to their front lines.

In what may be the opening battle of the war for Iraq, the Kurds are preparing to crush a fundamentalist group which has seized territory on the Iraqi-Iranian border and which some claim provides evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Iraqi Kurdish sources say they need to move quickly to crush the Taliban-inspired Islamists known as Ansar-al-Islam because, if a US-led attack on Saddam begins, all peshmerga forces will be needed to surge southwards into government-controlled Iraq. They do not want to face a war on two fronts.

Kurdish sources say Ansar-al-Islam is backed by an unlikely coalition of Al Qaeda, Iran and Saddam’s Iraq. The peshmergas say Saddam’s intelligence services are providing money and other backing to al-Ansar. None of these three has any ideological sympathy with the others, but both Iran and Saddam have an interest in weakening the Kurds.

From fortifications above the village of Darashish it is possible to see al-Ansar’s bunkers and, with binoculars, their turbaned fighters. Many are known to have fought in Afghanistan and about 70 are believed to be Arabs and Afghan Al Qaeda members, many of whom have found sanctuary here since the fall of the Taliban.

Over the past few weeks the 1,000-strong lpeshmerga force belonging to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has been bolstered by 2,000 peshmergas from elsewhere in the Kurdish safe haven that was set up beyond Saddam’s control in 1991.

The haven is guarded by US and British warplanes, but the area lies well beyond the Iraqi no-fly zone.

According to Lt Col Ahmad Chekha Omer, a senior peshmerga commander, positions overlooking al-Ansar were visited just over two weeks ago by nine US military intelligence officers. They were preceded by three British officers. He believed his high command had requested air strikes in support of a peshmerga attack.

According to Omer: “If the Iranians don’t interfere we can finish them easily.” He says Iranian military trucks were spotted in the area two months ago, that Iran has supplied the al-Ansar fighters with three truck-mounted Katyush multiple rocket launchers, and that Iranian officers give them maps and weapons training.

In the past, Iran has supported the PUK and it was the Iranian-peshmerga capture of nearby Halabja in 1988 that resulted in Saddam’s chemical attack on the city which killed 5,000. Now the Iranian regime does not want to see a democratic and pro-Western Iraq replacing Saddam’s regime. A worse scenario for Tehran is a federal Iraq with a prosperous Kurdish unit, leading to similar demands from Iran’s eight million Kurds.

Al-Ansar’s connections to Saddam’s regime raise the possibility of linking the Iraqi dictator and the 11 September attacks. PUK sources say prisoners have attested to a link between al-Ansar and Iraqi intelligence. Their leaders and many men fought in Afghanistan. According to Akbar San Ahmed, the peshmerga commander for Halabja, documents found on the body of an al-Ansar fighter after a battle last September, when 42 peshmerga prisoners were massacred, included the words: ‘This is a gift to bin Laden.’ In jail in Sulaimaniya, the PUK holds a man convicted of being an Iraqi agent. An Iranian Arab, he has told them he smuggled arms from Baghdad to bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and drugs from Al Qaeda that were used to buy more arms.

The man, Mansour Shahab Ali, 27, talks nervously. In an interview with The Observer, he said he met Osama bin Laden four times and carried out three murders for him. The interview was conducted in the presence of PUK officials and there is no way of checking its veracity.

Apart from armaments, Shahab Ali claims that in 2000 he smuggled 30 refrigerator motors, which he believes were filled with a gas, from Iraq to bin Laden.

Given Saddam’s use of chemical weapons in Kurdistan, and during the Iran-Iraq war, this raises speculation that Iraq was supplying Osama with materials for chemical weapons. Shahab Ali gave no reason why Saddam would want to support Al Qaeda, which has publicly blasted Arab regimes like his.

Shahab Ali’s stories, if true, provide an insight into the murky connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq and back US claims of such a link.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.