Paul Bremer, the ruler of Iraq, is a former anti-terrorism expert from the State Department. That was one reason he got the job. We may, therefore, presume that he knows whereof he speaks about terrorism in post-war Iraq, especially since he has access to the latest intelligence.

Last Friday, a day after a bomb ripped apart the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 17 people, this is what he said: "We have a substantial number of Ansar terrorists around here."

He was referring to Ansar al Islam, a small guerrilla group that once had a base in the mountains of the Kurdish region of northeastern Iraq.

In the weeks leading up to the war on Iraq, the Bush administration, desperate to link Saddam Hussein to terrorism, cited Ansar as his conduit to Al Qaeda.

Ansar, in fact, had been waging a brutal war since 2001 against the secular Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The group's leader, Mullah Mustafa Kreker, awaiting refugee status in Norway, scoffed at the alleged links to Al Qaeda.

So did the International Crisis Group, a Belgian-based think tank. It dismissed Ansar as "nothing more than a minor irritant in local Kurdish politics," and added that "it is not surprising that the PUK has sought to emphasize the group's putative terrorist connections."

Still, Colin Powell, in his Feb. 5 speech to the U.N., said that an Ansar camp was an Al Qaeda chemical weapons factory. He also alleged that, "Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization," i.e. Ansar, and that the agent had arranged safe haven there for Al Qaeda members from Afghanistan in 2000.

However, reporters rushing to the site found no factory. And Mullah Krekar said he had "never seen or met" the alleged agent.

When the war on Iraq began, it was natural that PUK and other Kurdish militias would join the Americans in destroying the Ansar force, which was said to number 650 or 700 or, maybe, even 800 — nobody seems to know, for sure.

A major assault involving missiles, bombers, helicopters and armored vehicles resulted in the killing of dozens of Ansar members — 150 or 200 or 250, depending on who was talking. Dozens were reported arrested and an unknown number were said to have slipped away, perhaps across the Iranian border.

Ansar al Islam was pronounced dead.

Nothing more was heard of the group until last month when the occupying American forces started running into violent resistance.

Bremer and other officials identified the attackers as "dead-enders" and "bitter-enders" among Saddam's "Baathist remnants," along with Shiites, Iran-backed militias, "Fedayeen," mysterious "foreigners" whose origins were left undefined as well as members of Ansar al Islam.

Which brings us back to Bremer's words last week, and since. How did he know Ansar was behind the Jordanian embassy terrorism?

Because, he said, car bombings are standard for Middle East terrorist groups but virtually unknown in Iraq. "We believe there are now quite a number of these Ansar al Islam professional killers on the loose in the country." His officials estimated their number at "perhaps 150."

So: The Ansar obituary had proved premature.

Not surprising, given the post-war chaos.

But, Bremer also added, American intelligence has it that "there was part of Mukhabarat (Saddam's secret security force) that specialized in sophisticated bombings, and it is possible that this kind of technique did exist."

So: The Baghdad blast had the stamp of foreign terrorists but it could have been carried out by locals, even while the Ansar is back — this time not just in the mountains but in the capital itself.

In other words, Americans don't quite know what they are talking about when it comes to where the resistance is coming from, just as they don't have a clue about much else in Iraq.

Then came a gem yesterday in a front-page story about Ansar in the New York Times. Veteran correspondent Neil MacFarquhar reported:

"Although initially strictly a Kurdish organization, its ranks swelled with Arab fighters after the U.S. attack in Afghanistan in October, 2001" — not 2000, as Powell had said.

MacFarquhar also drew the specter of Iraq as the new Afghanistan and cited a statement by Mullah Krekar last Sunday from Norway to a Lebanese satellite TV station.

Sounding like an Osama bin Laden wannabe, Krekar said that American-occupied Iraq is the new frontier of jihad against America, just as the Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was for the earlier generation of Mujahideen (who were supported by the CIA).

So: The two wars launched by the George W. Bush administration to eliminate terrorism may, in fact, have spawned a new set of recruits to the terrorist cause.

In a further irony, the jihadists are said to be congregating not in some failed state ruled by fundamentalists in cahoots with bin Laden but right under the noses of American troops in an American-run colony.

Haroon Siddiqui is The Star's editorial page editor emeritus.

Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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