Word: ansar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...final 48 hours of Ramadan. But authorities say last week's arrests were the culmination of long investigations, not hasty responses to the Istanbul blasts. And some of them were meant to thwart a different threat: the export of suicide bombers from Europe, mainly to Iraq. Groups like Ansar al-Islam have reportedly stepped up recruitment on the Continent. "There has been a call from Ansar for kamikazes from Europe," says an Italian investigator. Authorities say they intercepted a satellite-phone conversation in which Mullah Fouad, a 32-year-old Iraqi, speaking from Syria, told a Hamburg operative: "I need...
...join the battle, both of them veterans of the civil war in Sudan. CIA briefers told a group of Senators in Washington last week that fighters who have arrived recently from Syria and Iran are more skilled than those who came earlier in the year. The briefers said Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda that the U.S. targeted during the fighting last spring, is "reconstituting" in northern Iraq...
...harrowing hours of bombing in Baghdad. Some officials continued to insist that most of the insurgents were Saddam loyalists. Others said the sophistication of four nearly simultaneous attacks indicated the work of foreign fighters--Islamic radicals from outside Iraq, perhaps representing al-Qaeda or the related terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. Several Administration officials told TIME that Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, is becoming more active in Iraq. Pentagon officials leaked word that captured insurgents had claimed that Iraqi General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a Saddam intimate who is No. 6 on the U.S. most-wanted list...
...bombings. Moreover, a Pentagon intelligence officer in Iraq told TIME, "It is totally against the psychology of the Iraqi people" to become willing suicide bombers. In Washington's view, the troublemakers are foreign terrorists, either al-Qaeda operatives or returning members of the al-Qaeda--linked Iraqi group Ansar al-Islam. Many Iraqis blame the big hits on an influx of Arab Islamists bent on holy war. Observers say unknown numbers have slipped into Iraq from Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The declining influence of Saddam's loyalists has apparently emboldened Iraq's Islamist groups to begin coordinating with...
...most hospitable ally for al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq remains Ansar al-Islam, the militant group of Afghan-trained fighters that was based in northern Iraq before the war; hundreds of Ansar members fled to Iran after a U.S.-led assault on their base in March. Since then, says a security chief in Kurdistan named Khasraw, the Ansar fighters have returned to Iraq and established cells in Fallujah and Baghdad, with the aim to "attack U.S. interests everywhere on orders from outside, namely al-Qaeda." U.S. agencies believe that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a suspected al-Qaeda operative and senior...