Word: ansar
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...come from abroad, but others seem to be indigenous. "We are not seeing a major flow of foreign fighters coming across the border," says Kimmitt. He thinks there are a "couple of hundred" extremists doing the dirty work, including a few al-Qaeda elements, remnants of Ansar al-Islam that were dispersed from their headquarters in the Kurdish north during the war, Sunni extremists who share bin Laden's radical brand of Islam and a trickle of individual volunteer jihadis...
...most often cited by occupation authorities as the ringleader is al-Zarqawi. They frequently tie the Jordanian militant to al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam. But now al-Zarqawi seems to be running his own network in Iraq. He allegedly set out, in a long letter U.S. officials attributed to him in January, his plan for inciting civil war through attacks on Iraqis. He was quickly blamed last week for the hotel bombing, which mimicked al-Qaeda's style. "I think he might be one of the leaders giving instructions," says Hertling. Catching al-Zarqawi is a "daily mission," says...
...Tiny cells lining a long, dimly-lit corridor contain people who until recently were considered some of Iraq's most dangerous insurgents. Their inspiration, they say, comes directly from al-Qaeda. So too did some of their instructions, until the American invasion of Iraq smashed Ansar's base in northern Iraq, and sent its members fleeing into Iran. "About 35 Saudis came to see us from al-Qaeda before the war, in order to cement their relationship with us," says Quds Hassan Abbas, 32, who led one of Ansar's fighting battalions until shortly before the war erupted...
...Both men concede that the invasion dealt a heavy blow to Ansar. With no base to call their own, ranking members lie low just over Iraq's eastern border in the Iranian town of Marivan. Iranians there do a busy trade producing fake identity cards for Ansar fighters for their return to Iraq across the 5,000-foot mountains. With overburdened Iraqi border patrols guarding a 1,000-mile frontier, Ansar's return is almost impossible to block, and Kurdish guards expect little help from Iranian officials in stopping the infiltration...
...Americans. "We had different ideas. Some of us thought the suicide bombs were useless," said Abbas. When he was arrested last October near Baqubah, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, he had been trying to start a break-away armed force of radical Muslims, which could operate separately from Ansar's forces...