Word: ansar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unsuspecting taxi driver was both the vehicle and a victim of a suicide bombing in Northern Iraq, today - an attack that served as a reminder that there are no rules in the campaign by the Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Islam against the local Kurdish authorities. The fight for control of a tiny sliver of northern Iraq pitches fighters loyal to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which rules the eastern part of the territory liberated from Saddam Hussein in 1991, against Ansar, a small cadre of homegrown Islamic militants supported, trained and reinforced by Osama bin Laden's organization. And today...
...suicide bomber used a Land Rover taxi that regularly plies the route between Halabja and the town of Sayyid Sadiq to help him cross from Ansar-held territory into the zone controlled by government forces. He detonated his charges when confronted by government troops at a roadside checkpoint, killing two soldiers, the taxi driver and himself. The attack coincided with a conference of Iraqi opposition organizations on a post-Saddam political order, attended by Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition. Though believed to have been simply coincidental, the timing was poignant: Khalizad had come...
...correspondent witnessed the explosion from a ridge-top bunker a short distance away. A flash and thick curls of smoke engulfed the road before the crack of the explosion washed across farmers' fields. Moments later, a Kurdish government mortar battery retorted, dropping a round on the lip of an Ansar bunker within view of the chaotic checkpoint scene...
...Kurdish trenches are hit by mortar and heavy machinegun fire from the Ansar lines on a daily basis. On Monday night, TIME's correspondent had sheltered with a peshmerga frontline unit through a four-hour barrage. But the resort to suicide tactics shifts the boundaries. Some of the soldiers present during the attack at the Zamaqi roadblock claim a suicide bomber struck the Halabja bazaar last year. However, a Kurdish political officer assigned to oversee the Ansar front, Burhan Saeed Sofi from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party (which controls the Kurdish region's eastern half) says that attack...
...That assertion is unlikely to comfort the conference delegates seeking to broker agreement on the future of a post-Saddam Iraq. Ansar al-Islam has sent a clear reminder they are willing, and able, to strike anywhere. A month ago they assassinated a senior party and military official in the midst of negotiations with extremist elements. The Kurdish fighters along this frontline are anxiously awaiting the arrival on the battlefield of U.S. bombers and ground troops - to dispatch not only Saddam and Ba'ath Party, but also Ansar and its al-Qaeda backers...