Militants in Region Covet Iraqi Kurds

He wanted to be a jihad warrior in Kurdistan. But at the moment of truth, with 11 pounds of explosives strapped to his chest and a detonator switch hidden in his hand, Didar Khalid Khidir couldn’t blow himself up and enter paradise.

Tall and thin and shuffling around in plastic sandals, the 20-year-old now spends his days in a Kurdish prison here. He was to have been what his terrorist handlers call a “baby lion.” Instead, he’s a confused disciple who found himself at a military checkpoint, his trigger finger stiff with fear.

The cellblocks echo with the voices of young men and boys like Khidir, would-be suicide bombers and Islamic militants claiming allegiance to Ansar al-Islam and other extremist Muslim groups that have sought to control this mountainous sliver of northern Iraq. These prisoners are testaments to the decades-old persistence -- and failure -- of political Islam in seeking to insinuate itself through money, religious passion and armed struggle into the hearts of a resistant Kurdish population.

“I was convinced I wanted to be a martyr,” said Khidir, sitting beside a kerosene heater as his jailer smoked cigarettes. “Then, all of a sudden, I didn’t.”

Amid the towns and villages along Iraq’s border with Iran, there are two forms of Islam at work, each with only limited success. The first consists of tiled mosques built recently by benefactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They are affiliated with charitable and political organizations, such as the Kurdish Islamic League, that give poor families monthly stipends on the condition that children receive religious instruction, study the Koran and, if they’re girls, wear head scarves.

The second form is more sinister. It is the one Khidir embraced, a world of recruiters combing mosques, schools and neighborhoods for impressionable boys and young men. Once identified, these budding warriors are sent to camps where they learn to fire Kalashnikovs and rig explosives. They are taught that death for God is beautiful and pressured to accept that fate as a guerrilla or suicide bomber.

“These groups have different strategies,” said Shwan Ahmed, an expert on political Islam here in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah. “One attempts to buy people through charity. The other is more Taliban-like. They follow the ideology of Osama bin Laden. But the ultimate goal is the same. They are out for power and control, and they want the Kurds to be their Muslim brothers in their battle against the West.”

This land has known turmoil for centuries. An autonomous wedge of northern Iraq called Kurdistan, it is home to 3.5 million Kurds protected from Iraqi forces by a “no-fly” zone patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes. In the eastern section, the militia of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, is awaiting a U.S.- led invasion of Iraq while it battles the 400 to 700 Islamic militants in Ansar al-Islam.

Modern political Islam breached these mountains half a century ago when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt called for a global Islamic revival. The first branch in Kurdistan opened in the oil city of Kirkuk. The movement spread, straddling the border of Iraq and Iran and reaching into backwater villages. For a time during the Cold War, it was supported by the West as a counter to Communist influence.

Religious extremism didn’t gain real popularity in this predominantly Muslim population, however, until the 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran. Groups such as the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan and precursors to the Kurdish Islamic League attempted to permeate religious life and politics, while another group, the Army of Islam, fought Kurdish militias with mortars and machine guns for souls in outlying valleys. These cells were largely contained by PUK forces, but radical Islam received another boost in 1988, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime used chemical weapons to kill 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja.

“The radicals exploited the chemical attacks and the poverty that came after the Gulf War in 1991,” Ahmed said. “But these groups never really succeeded because they never came from the Kurdish people.

“Unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, which grew from the roots of their own people, Kurdish political Islam was always manipulated from the outside,” he added. “This showed itself in 1991 when the leader of the Muslim International Brotherhood denounced the Kurdish ambition for independence, saying it was ‘another Israel’ led by the U.S.”

Political Islam in Kurdistan today is splintered over money and ideological differences. Muslim agencies worldwide such as the Islamic International Relief Organization, a prime source of funding for Kurdish Islamic projects, have curtailed funding since the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. The Islamic Movement of Kurdistan has been weakened by internal squabbles. Another militant group, Komaly Islami, is kept in check by PUK forces. To the west, the militia of the Kurdistan Democratic Party has suppressed most radical groups.

Ansar, which grew out of the other Islamic groups, is the most lethal. Some of its members trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It enforces a rigid religious society for between 8,000 and 10,000 Kurds living in villages scattered along the valleys and mountain creases near Iran. Its attacks and mortars have killed dozens of PUK fighters in recent months, and the group is said to have plotted several unsuccessful suicide bombings and assassinations in Sulaymaniyah.

In Halabja, where cows have to be shooed away and roads are muddy, the guns of Ansar echo through the courtyards and over the minarets of more than 50 mosques. Bahiya Mohammed Hassan lives there with her four daughters. Her husband, Ali, breathed in fumes from the chemical attack in 1988. He died of cancer six years later.

Halabja lies in a traditional valley. Without a man in the household, Hassan needs financial help raising her children. The Kurdistan Save the Children foundation, or KSC, gives the family the equivalent of about $14 a month. The Islamic Movement of Kurdistan provides her with $28 a month.

Often, according to social workers, when KSC funds a family, it is only a matter of time before an Islamic organization follows with a larger donation. In some cases, the Islamic charities impose stipulations, such as requiring that children not attend secular art and music classes sponsored by the KSC.

“We lost 35% of our students in our recreational courses because the Islamists want to keep children away from them. They want to impose the Koran,” said Dana Hussein Qadir, coordinator of the KSC. “These families are poor and they need the money, so they pull the kids out.”

Qadir noted, however, that the Islamists’ outside money “is decreasing and our economy has gotten better, so fewer people rely on them.”

Hassan’s daughter, Aween, 10, must wear a scarf and memorize the Koran to receive Islamist payments. Aween and other children receiving the donations say they attend religious instruction on ethics and morality and love. Aween said she would rather not wear the black head scarf that flows over the shoulders of her yellow jacket.

“Wearing scarves has become a forced tradition,” said Hassan, sitting with her daughters, their heads all covered, on their living room floor.

Beyond Hassan’s house, past miles of PUK checkpoints and bunkers, past refugees and bored village boys, the call to prayer warbles through the Sulaymaniyah prison walls. Khidir sits in a small room in a plastic chair staring at his hands, which drop out of the sleeves of a black coat. He looks up and half-smiles; the jailer nods and lights the first of many cigarettes.

Khidir does not come from a religious family. The son of a taxi driver, he grew up in the conservative city of Irbil, quit school in the eighth grade and learned how to be a mechanic on broken cars in his neighborhood. He said that he was not into Islam but that two years ago, he began attending prayers at a mosque.

“My father told me, ‘Don’t become a fundamentalist,’ ” he said.

Stepping into the mosque one day, he met an engineering student named Anas, a tall round-faced man with green eyes.

“Anas told me he was a religious teacher, and he invited me to one of his classes,” Khidir said. “He talked about sins you should not commit and about purifying your soul. He was passionate. To me, he was a true Muslim. He was well-spoken and calm.”

Anas urged Khidir to read the Koran. Khidir said he was drawn to the chapter on holy war. He likened it to a movie he once saw about the prophet Muhammad.

“There was a lot of fighting and killing,” he said, “and I thought I’d like to be in something like that.... Anas interpreted the verses for me. He told me about commitment and the difference between true and false Islam. He said you should fight whoever is not Islam. He told me I must fight the PUK and that jihad was the only solution.”

The battle had already begun. Islamic militants were attacking PUK forces in the villages of Khelly Hama and Tawerah.

Anas and Khidir later drove to Al Biyara, an Ansar stronghold.

“When we arrived, Anas went to the front line. It seemed he had been trained before,” Khidir said. “I went to beginner courses on how to fire Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and high-caliber machine guns. There was no religious training, just guns.”

He was assigned guard duty in Al Biyara and the village of Gulp. He memorized the Koran. He heard the sound of mortars, but he had not seen battle.

“A guy named Hisham began hanging around me,” Khidir said. “He talked to me about martyrdom operations. He said you end up in paradise. He said there are 72 mermaids in paradise” -- a variation on the traditionally promised 72 virgins. “They are your rewards. He talked to me about this for three or four months.”

Khidir was in Gulp when the radio call came. He was taken to Al Biyara and given a vest with batteries, an ignition switch and explosives. He received two hours of instruction and was reminded that death in the name of jihad would be glorious.

With a jacket concealing the vest and a wire running down his arm to a switch in his hand, Khidir was led to a car with two men he didn’t know. He was told he’d be dropped off at a PUK militia headquarters in Sayed Sadeq, about a 40-minute drive away. He would get out of the car, cross the checkpoint and blow himself up, killing as many others as he could.

“While I was in the car, I kept thinking how I’d approach God in the second world,” he said. “They dropped me off, and I walked to the checkpoint. Something happened to me. I didn’t want to do it. I felt pushed by them. I felt ashamed to admit it. But after they dropped me off, the pressure was gone, and I was scared. The guards must have seen the color go out of my face.

“The guards asked me what I wanted. I told them.”

Khidir was arrested last June 17. He was sentenced to five years in prison.