Guerrillas Kill Kurdish Leader in Iraq

A terrorist group in northern Iraq was holding two ethnic Kurds hostage Sunday after the assassination of a popular political leader that left five other people dead and escalated tensions between the secular Kurdish government and well-armed Islamic militants linked to Al Qaeda.

The group, known as Ansar al-Islam, attacked a village home with rifles and grenades Saturday night, killing Shawkat Haji Mushir, a legislator from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, which controls the eastern portion of northern Iraq. Two security officials were also slain, along with three villagers. Six people were wounded, including a 9-year-old girl shot in the head.

It was Ansar’s deadliest -- and most treacherous -- attack since December, when barefoot terrorists sneaked into a bunker and began an hours-long battle that killed at least 43 PUK fighters. The group of between 400 and 700 guerrillas not only has connections to the Al Qaeda terrorist network but has been accused by the Bush administration of operating a poison factory and terrorist training camp in mountains along the Iranian border.

As Mushir’s coffin, draped in green cloth, was carried through a crowd of hundreds gathered at a cemetery on a rocky hill Sunday, the anger in the troubled region over its long battles with various enemies echoed across this city. Founded in 2001, Ansar has added another layer of bloodshed to a Kurdish population hoping that a U.S. invasion would topple their biggest nemesis: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“They are bats in their mountain caves, and they are against humanity,” Sheik Ali, a Muslim cleric, said of Ansar in a eulogy for Mushir. “They killed him in a dirty plot.”

Using the ruse that 121 of its guerrillas wanted to defect, an Ansar faction first contacted the PUK. Subsequently, Mushir, a respected mountain fighter turned politician who was skilled at peace negotiations, met secretly with Ansar representatives at least twice in efforts to reach a surrender agreement.

Then, on Saturday, another meeting was set in the village of Gamesh Tapa, where territories held by the PUK, Ansar and other parties nearly intersect. Ansar acted wary that the PUK might arrest its negotiators. The PUK sent two of its members to Ansar to allay any fears.

According to a witness and a Kurdish security official, Mushir and an Ansar fighter named Ali Teezha talked in a village home for about 45 minutes. As Mushir leaned over a table to write a letter for Teezha, the security official said, Teezha shot Mushir with a Kalashnikov. Two Ansar fighters waiting outside killed two of Mushir’s escorts and opened fire on the house.

The Ansar members escaped on foot to a car waiting in a nearby village. Other Ansar guerrillas took the two PUK representatives -- Zahir Tofiq and Fouad Mam Agha -- hostage.

“They planned to kill him,” the security official said, referring to Mushir. “The purpose was to kill him.”

“The shooting started,” said Salih Hassan, the host at Mushir’s meeting with Ansar. “We didn’t know who was who. We tried to find a place to hide, to get on the ground.... The window was large and low. I saw bullets coming in and hitting everybody. We had no corner to hide in. I didn’t see the gunmen. The shooting stopped, and the villagers ran to the house and took us to the hospital.”

Hassan was shot in the left leg. His son Siyamund and daughter-in-law Fatima Tofiq were among those killed. His son Saman, two cousins and his 9-year-old granddaughter, Daroon, the daughter of Fatima Tofiq, were among the wounded. Doctors said Daroon was not expected to live.

“Tear Ansar apart,” the girl’s cousin Burhan Nuri said as he stood over her hospital bed. “They have no program to serve humanity ... to do what they’ve done to this child. Her mother is killed. Her uncle is killed.”

The assassination jolted the PUK, whose military forces have been unable to defeat Ansar fighters, who include between 40 and 70 Al Qaeda members who fled Afghanistan. The two sides are in a stalemate punctuated by mortar rounds that rumble across a handful of mountain villages. The PUK is hoping that U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles will destroy Ansar’s hide-outs and bunkers in the early days of an attack on Iraq.

Ansar -- imposing strict Islamic laws on territory it controls -- has failed a number of times at assassinations and suicide bombings as it has attempted to take its holy war to Kurdish cities. Its few successes, however, have unnerved the region with their brutality. A foiled attempt on the life of PUK Prime Minister Barham Salih left five bodyguards dead. The group filmed its attack on the PUK bunker in December and gleefully showed off the bodies of Kurdish fighters, some of them mutilated.

A sinister folklore has enveloped Ansar. Kurdish officials claim it is producing poisonous cigarettes and cyanide cream and paint that “within two or three hours of exposure will kill you.” The group’s stronghold in the mountains is located amid a strange geographical quilt of political and religious parties that control territory with their own militias and clan leaders.

When Mushir was killed, for example, PUK authorities called for help on both a socialist party and an Islamic group, known as Komaly Islami, whose territories fringe Ansar-held villages. They are part of an unofficial network primed by money and opportunism and the art of survival.

After Mushir’s funeral, his coffin was carried out of a mosque and loaded onto a flatbed truck. A longtime foe of Hussein’s regime, the slain leader was idolized by young soldiers, some of whom jumped on the truck as it wound through the dusty streets of Sulaymaniyah. Children stopped and watched. The procession climbed a hill on the city’s outskirts, where graves of the poor are marked by cinderblocks and slabs of unfinished stone.

Mushir’s wife collapsed in grief as her husband was lowered into the earth. Military guards stood at attention, their bayonet blades shining in the sun. Shovels appeared, and the hole was quickly filled. The men cleared away and women arrived, wailing and falling to the ground.

Earlier, one eulogizer observed: “This man sacrificed his life for the sake of peace. This is a tragedy to our nation, one of the many tragedies our nation has endured. Ansar is terrorizing people, and they are doing it in the name of Islam. It is the duty of all of us to fight them.”