Kuwait Prisoners Tied to Radical Iraqi Sect

The 17 prisoners in Kuwait whom hijackers of a Kuwait Airways jet are seeking to free are believed to be members of a radical underground Iraqi group called Al Daawa, which has strong ties to Iran.

Al Daawa (the Call) is a Muslim fundamentalist group that was barred from political activity in Iraq eight years ago and is now headquartered in Tehran. About 1,000 members of the group, which opposes the Arab Baath Socialist Party regime of Iraq, have been expelled from Iraq.

U.S. government sources Tuesday described Al Daawa as a Shia Muslim group loyal to Iran’s ruler, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The 17 suspected members of the group now held by Kuwait were imprisoned after suicide bomb attacks on U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983 in which six people were killed and 60 wounded.

Among the prisoners in Kuwait are 12 Iraqis, three Lebanese, a Kuwaiti and one stateless person. The Kuwaiti government refused to consider their release during an earlier hijacking in 1984, when suspected members of Al Daawa seized a Kuwaiti jet on a flight to Pakistan and forced it to land in Tehran.

Brian Jenkins, director of research on political violence and terrorism for the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, described Al Daawa “as among the most determined” of the Muslim fundamentalist groups in the Middle East, noting that it has pressed for release of the prisoners in Kuwait for more than four years.

“One demand for release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon is the release of the 17 Al Daawa prisoners in Kuwait,” Jenkins said. “They have established themselves not just in Iran but in other neighboring countries. In terms of dangerousness, they rank quite high among the Shia Muslim groups.”