Ansar al Islam's European connection
A Road to Ansar Began in Italy
Wiretaps are said to show how Al Qaeda sought to create in northern Iraq a substitute for training camps in Afghanistan.

 

First of two-parts  SUNDAY REPORT April 27, 2003

 

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer

DAGA SHERKHAN, Iraq -- In this mountain crease beyond the orchards, a stream meanders past abandoned houses scattered with prayer caps, sunflower seeds, religious scrawling, a ski mask, spent bullet casings and the remote control for a half-finished bomb.

Before U.S. Special Forces and Kurdish fighters overran the region last month, this was the redoubt of Ansar al Islam, the radical Islamic group that the Bush administration alleged was the nexus between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and therefore part of the justification for invading Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell asserted in February that Ansar was running a "poison factory" and was intent on exporting terrorism from the Middle East through Europe and into the United States.

Many of the guerrillas who lived here are dead now. Others vanished through the white-rock canyons of northern Iraq. They left behind thousands of pages of documents, letters, wills and computer files that reveal the extent of their ambitions -- and call into question the U.S. allegations.

Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, along with interviews with U.S. and Kurdish intelligence operatives, indicate the group was partly funded and armed from abroad; was experimenting with chemicals, including toxic agents and a cyanide-based body lotion; and had international aspirations.

But the documents, statements by imprisoned Ansar guerrillas and visits to the group's strongholds before and after the war produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization. The group was a dedicated, but fledgling, Al Qaeda surrogate lacking the capability to muster a serious threat beyond its mountain borders.

The main intent of the group's 700 to 800 guerrillas was to battle the secular U.S.-backed Kurdish government in northern Iraq. Last month, they were swept from their camps in a three-day campaign by 6,000 Kurdish fighters supported by U.S. warplanes and Special Forces. An estimated 250 Ansar members were killed, and 40 to 100 Arabs in the group fled to neighboring Iran and other countries. Under U.S. pressure, Iran denied refuge to 300 other guerrillas, some of whom surrendered to Kurdish authorities. About 200 others are believed to be hiding in caves and villages near Iran.

The documents -- culled from the group's mountain bases and from the bodies of dead fighters -- provide a window into the mind and strategy of militant Islam. One floppy disc, for example, contains 22 files in Arabic relating to military tactics, intelligence and discipline. A 317-page manual -- similar to ones found in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan -- contains dozens of pages and graphics copied from U.S. Army training texts, as well as details on how to rig booby traps, construct a bomb out of a hairbrush and sabotage airports, bridges and tunnels.

Hundreds of pages of scientific materials include information on mustard gas, the venom of black widow spiders and the risks of tainting mail with biotoxins. One file shows how to concoct "fatal doses" of heroin, which can be given as "Valentine presents" to unsuspecting victims. Other files contain the biography of Osama bin Laden, rambling accounts of Islamic battles throughout history and how to inspire the credo: "Terrify the enemies of Allah."

Written in Arabic and Kurdish, the documents are woven with Koran poetry and dry tabulations, such as the velocity of a Kalashnikov bullet and instructions for operating a 120 mm Russian-made mortar. There are paeans to "martyred" suicide bombers and tips on "seducing" the enemy to provide information.

Ansar was seeking to form its own intelligence-gathering wings with secret contacts and code names. Many of the documents stress how "intelligence on the enemy gives the army victory." The group believes, according to the files, that Muslim organizations must be dedicated to understanding "the nonsleeping eyes" of satellites and information technologies in spying, or in preventing "the nonbeliever" from attacking "those whom God remembers."

Ansar was the commingling of radical groups seeking holy war against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the PUK, which governs the eastern portion of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. One of the group's founding members was Mullah Krekar, who had ties to Bin Laden lieutenants in Afghanistan and Pakistan and is now under investigation in Norway.

In the summer of 2001, he led 300 fighters across northern Iraq into the radical Islamic belt near the Iranian border. Krekar merged with another militant group, Jund al Islam, founded nine days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., and in December 2001 the new Ansar spread through villages.

Its arsenal was formidable, including thousands of rockets, grenades and mortars made in or transported through China, Russia, France, Italy and Iran. Rooms in its military headquarters in Biyara are littered with hundreds of triggering fuses and mines with explosive materials scooped out for other purposes. The group made car bombs with diesel fuel and a C-4-like explosive, and its suicide vests were constructed of canvas, TNT and ignition switches.

Ansar's war against the U.S.-backed PUK was defined by sporadic mortar fire and guerrilla ambushes. The group's biggest victory came last winter when three of its fighters, moving barefoot through the night, sneaked into a PUK hilltop bunker and signaled other Ansar fighters below to attack. The assault killed 43 Kurdish soldiers. Photographs of their mutilated bodies were featured on Ansar's Web site.

The dynamics of the group changed in late 2001 and 2002, when Al Qaeda fighters and what one intelligence official described as "professional" terrorists fled the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and sought sanctuary in the outposts of northern Iraq. Ansar's battle against the PUK widened into a bid for international jihad.

Passports and identity cards retrieved in recent weeks from dead Ansar fighters and from offices in Biyara and other villages show that recruits arrived from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Morocco, Italy, Germany, Canada, Syria and Egypt. Some used several aliases and had residency papers from European countries.

Kurdish intelligence officials assert that Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who allegedly masterminded Bin Laden's chemical weapons unit, briefly traveled to northern Iraq last year and assisted Ansar in compiling chemical agents, including ricin, a poison derived from castor plant beans that causes respiratory failure.

A senior U.S. official said recently there may be a connection between Ansar and the Algerians arrested last winter in London with ricin. European officials dispute this allegation and, so far, ricin has not been detected at Ansar bases.

Some Western officials are skeptical that Zarqawi visited Ansar, but phone intercepts by Italian and U.S. intelligence suggest that there were elements of his network in Iraqi territory.

Chemicals were certainly part of Ansar's focus.

Sargat, a village tucked beneath a mountain snowline on the Iranian border, was Ansar's crude laboratory until it was hit by nine U.S. cruise missiles. The site had been targeted in February when Powell showed a slide of the compound during his report before the U.N. Security Council.

A recent visit to Sargat revealed no sophisticated equipment, only pungent, ammonia-like scents; white and brown granules wrapped in fist-size bags; beakers; rubber gloves; surgical masks; bags of powdered milk; penicillin and other drugs.

A Special Forces major investigating Ansar said chemicals found at Sargat are being analyzed by U.S. intelligence. Tests have revealed the presence of hydrogen cyanide and potassium cyanide, poisons normally used to kill rodents and other pests. The group, according to Kurdish officials, had been experimenting on animals with a cyanide-laced cream. Several jars of peach body lotion lay at the site beside chemicals and a few empty wooden birdcages. One U.S. official said intelligence teams found large quantities of vitamin B-12, an antidote to cyanide poisoning.

"There's a lot of documentation that shows" intent to manufacture toxic agents, the Special Forces major said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There's a lot of recipes.... We found a bunch of mysterious sites."

A senior Defense Department official said: "They know they found potassium cyanide up there. But potassium cyanide has a lot of different uses, and it's not necessarily proof of weapons of mass destruction."

The U.S. is tracing a possible link between Hussein's regime and Ansar, but it has not made a solid connection. Much of the investigation centers on one man, Abu Wael, who joined Ansar in 2001 and, according to U.S. intelligence, was Hussein's secret liaison between Baghdad and Ansar. U.S. officials say that Wael and other Ansar members traveled through Baghdad and met with "high-ranking" government members.

When pressed about a direct tie between Ansar and Baghdad, the Special Forces major said: "It's very difficult to make a crystal-clear link. ... These guys did not take group pictures at their meetings."

The documents and numerous visits to Ansar territory suggest that most Ansar fighters did not ponder geopolitics. They did not spend their time writing treatises. They lived in regimented camps. They dug caves to store mortar shells and Katyusha rockets. Many were young, radical Kurds who knew the secrets of the mountains. They took turns cooking; one Saturday lunch menu was rice and Pepsi. They cleaned guns and followed prayer schedules.

As in Afghanistan, the camps attracted international recruits. Some entered Iran and crossed into northern Iraq only weeks before the U.S. war against Hussein began on March 20. Those who were killed or captured, and some of those who fled, left behind library and medical insurance cards, letters of recommendation, maps and passports.

Majed A.M. Al Sharif, a Saudi national, received an Iranian tourist visa and traveled from Doha, Qatar, to Iran sometime after Jan. 18. Another Saudi national, Loai M.M. Alyaman was in Dubai when he was granted an Iranian visa for a religious pilgrimage on March 11. Other arrivals included a Sudanese naval officer and Muhammed Hisham Hilali, a Tunisian who left a will that read:

"I insist my grave should be flat with the ground. My possessions should be distributed according to Islam. I bequeath my weapons and my bombs to the nearest holy warrior."

Another Ansar warrior, Jasim Ali Hussain, has many aliases. He carried identity cards from Iraq and Iran. He was imprisoned last month after being shot in the leg during a firefight against Kurdish forces. In an interview with two journalists, he gave yet another name and nationality: Ahmed Mohammed Tawil, a Palestinian from Gaza. He said he hates Americans and Jews and enlisted in Ansar to train to kill "the infidels."

"I'll fight against America every way I can," he said. "You can take my point of view to America; I don't mind."

Such fervor permeated life in the 15 villages under Ansar's control. A Taliban-like rigidity set in as Koranic law replaced civil law, and butchers, according to documents, were ordered to repeat "God is the greatest" when slaughtering animals. The bare-shouldered female model on bars of Lux soap was banned from shops, and checkpoint guards were instructed to confiscate as "immoral" any television or compact disc. Picture books supplied by the United Nations to poor villages controlled by Ansar were altered so that girls were veiled and men had beards.

The group insisted that women be veiled and covered. Boys and girls attending the same school was considered a "coeducational problem" that was solved when Ansar's leaders agreed to pay $90 a month for a taxi to drive girls to classes in a neighboring village.

"The woman is exploited by human and fairy devils," stated another Ansar edict, warning against lust and setting the cost of a marriage at $1,000. "This is to weaken the believers and to turn them from the straight direction.... We don't forget the destructive tools."

Believing holy places should honor only Allah, Ansar fighters dug up crypts in the blue-domed Biyara mosque, removing the bones of 14 holy men belonging to the Naqshbandi Muslim sect. Some Ansar leaders, including Ayub Afghani, a bomb maker, and Hemin Benishari, head of military tactics and assassinations, moved into apartments connected to the mosque, which sits above pomegranate and walnut trees.

The removal of the bones revealed Ansar's kinship with Afghanistan's Taliban government, which was internationally criticized for destroying ancient Buddhist statues it considered graven images against Allah.

In a four-page letter of support for the Taliban, Sheik Abdul Muneem Mustafa, an Ansar sympathizer, wrote that the West "accused the Taliban for breaking the Afghan idols but they are quiet over the killing of thousands of Muslim women, children and old people in Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir and Bosnia....The Taliban is a bad threat to those who support the nonbeliever, America."

Such documents -- many ripped and dirty -- were scattered over Ansar's battered redoubts after U.S. and Kurdish forces attacked the group March 27. Like scrapbooks opened to the wind, hundreds of Ansar photographs also flecked the ruins. They showed bearded guerrillas holding rifles in mountain fog and boys with holes in their sneakers and Kalashnikovs over their shoulders posing bravely in their bandoliers and kaffiyehs.

A boy standing on a muddy road with a bandaged thumb looks out from one picture. The writing on the back says the boy, an Ansar recruit, has volunteered to murder his father, a PUK official. The boy did not kill his father, but he later was arrested in a failed suicide-bombing attempt.

Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in Cremona, Italy, and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

 

 

Second of two parts  April 27, 2003

 

By Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer

CREMONA, Italy -- Days before the fall of the Ansar al Islam terrorist group in northern Iraq last month, an alleged Ansar militant named Noureddine Drissi got an urgent call on his satellite phone from his imam.

The call came from an unlikely place: this comfortable northern Italian town of 70,000 known for its 13th century bell tower, Christmas sweets and violin-making workshops that preserve the delicate artistry of Antonio Stradivari.

But on the clandestine map of Islamic terrorist networks, Cremona was closer than it seemed to the Iraqi village of Kurmal in Ansar's mountain stronghold. Drissi, a Tunisian immigrant, had left his job as the librarian of a mosque in Cremona three months earlier and made the journey to a terrorist training camp near Kurmal, authorities say. Italian police wiretapped his long-distance conversations with the religious leader in Cremona who had allegedly sent Drissi and other recruits to join Ansar's holy war.

During the March 18 call, Drissi sounded defiant but edgy on the eve of battle, according to wiretap transcripts. His voice straining over a weak connection, he asked the imam to attend to his family if anything happened to him.

"If you hear that Ansar al Islam has been hit you'll know it's us ... you understand?" Drissi said, according to the transcript. The imam said he had sent about $1,500 and a new recruit to Iraq, and Drissi said he hoped the new fighter was experienced.

"When he gets here we'll see.... May God help him.... You should call me before sending," Drissi said.

"Fine! But he's good!" said the imam, identified by authorities as a Tunisian named Mourad Trabelsi.

"May God pray for us!" Drissi said.

It is not known whether Drissi survived the combat that erupted soon afterward. Kurdish and U.S. troops routed Ansar on March 28, invading its bases and leaving hundreds of its fighters dead, captured or on the run in the borderlands where Iraq meets Iran.

Three days later, Italian anti-terrorist police carried out a related offensive in Cremona, Parma and Milan. They arrested Trabelsi and six other alleged members of a network that supplied Ansar with fighters recruited among North African and Kurdish immigrants in northern Italy.

Replacement Camps

Investigators say the case offers a picture of how Al Qaeda sought to transform Ansar's Iraqi stronghold into a substitute, on a smaller scale, for the Afghan camps to which the terrorist network had sent aspiring holy warriors before the U.S. defeated the Taliban in late 2001. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, members of a network commanded by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a top Al Qaeda figure, fled to the Russian republic of Chechnya and northeastern Iraq. U.S. and European investigators say Zarqawi's specialists used a camp in the village of Sargat, near Kurmal, to experiment with cyanide poisons, toxic gas and ricin, a castor bean extract that can be used as a biological weapon.

The network allegedly plotted attacks in Europe that were assigned to different ethnic cells — Algerians in Britain and France, Jordanians and Palestinians in Germany — but were ultimately dismantled by police.

As the prospect of a U.S. military operation in the Persian Gulf grew, the network's recruiters in Italy sent at least 40 fighters for terrorist training in Ansar camps and to help fight Kurdish forces, prosecutors say. Alleged ties between Al Qaeda and Ansar became a prime exhibit in the U.S. government's case for war when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his presentation to the United Nations in February, accused the Baghdad regime of protecting Zarqawi and his men.

Italian investigators say they found no evidence tying Al Qaeda and Ansar to the Iraqi regime, which did not control the region where the camps were located. In a wiretapped conversation in Trabelsi's Renault sedan March 18, the Cremona imam and a Kurdish recruiter described Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as an infidel tyrant for whom it was not worth fighting, according to Italian court documents.

"He who has fought beneath the flag of a blind man is ignorant," Trabelsi is alleged to have said, reciting a Koranic verse in reference to Hussein. "That has been said about only a blind man's flag, imagine beneath an infidel flag."

The investigation is said to have revealed an active role in Ansar plotting by suspected terrorists based in Syria and Iran — countries seen as potential targets in the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

Syria was a hub for recruits moving between Europe and Ansar's Iraqi stronghold, according to court documents. Overseers in the Damascus area apparently coordinated the flow of recruits and gave orders by phone to operatives in Europe. The suspected bosses in Syria include fugitives with ties to the Hamburg, Germany, cell that plotted the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as well as to the car-bomb attack on Israelis in Kenya in November, Italian authorities say.

Iran also served as a prime route for recruits bound for the Ansar camps and as a headquarters for Zarqawi, investigators say. Especially after the defeat of Ansar, Iran has become a refuge for fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda, according to court documents. Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, has gone into hiding in Iran, as have Zarqawi and his top lieutenants, Italian investigators say.

In the Italian case file, wiretaps of suspects based in Europe, Syria and Iraq fill dozens of pages of transcripts that tell an inside story of Al Qaeda in action.

Funding Not a Worry

A June 15 conversation laid out a blueprint of the network's evolution and survival despite law enforcement pressure. An unidentified visitor from Germany counseled the Egyptian imam of the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan to avoid communicating via the Internet, to speak in code with associates and to use messengers. Funding was still plentiful, the visitor said.

"Don't ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia's money is your money," the visitor said, speaking cultured Arabic with a North African accent.

And he explained how the terrorist networks had regrouped after Muslim leaders in London and others had been arrested. "Sheiks" had held secret strategy meetings in Austria, Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries where there was less heat, according to the transcript.

"Now Europe is controlled via air and land, but in Poland, Bulgaria and countries that aren't part of the European Community everything is easy," the visitor said. "First of all they are corrupt; you can buy them with dollars.... They are less-controlled countries, there aren't too many eyes."

Police are still trying to identify the apparently high-ranking visitor. The Milan imam, Hassan Nasr, was a key suspect, but he disappeared in February. His friends and family accuse Egyptian and U.S. spies of kidnapping him. An investigation has turned up no trace of him.

The Via Quaranta mosque and another on Milan's Viale Jenner have been bases for terrorist recruitment and logistics since the late 1990s, according to police.

Investigations led by prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso have resulted in a dozen arrests and eight convictions of extremists affiliated with the mosques. Nonetheless, during the last year, the two mosques became pivotal to the gradual restructuring of European networks under the command of Zarqawi, authorities say.

Zarqawi, 36, once ran his own training camp in Herat, Afghanistan, where militants learned to use chemical and biological weapons. His network allegedly includes Algerian combat veterans who trained in Chechnya and Jordanian gunmen who killed a representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Amman, Jordan, last year.

Investigators say Zarqawi has considerable autonomy from Bin Laden — and an obsession with Israeli targets because of his Palestinian-Jordanian background. In April 2002, German authorities arrested five people believed to be his followers and charged them with plotting a shooting attack on Jews in a public place. A few months later, Italian police identified suspects who were in phone contact with Zarqawi and his allies, court documents show. Two Kurds living on the semi-rural edge of Parma had set up operations for Ansar, according to authorities. Their phone number was found on Ansar leader Mullah Krekar when he was arrested in Amsterdam last September. Krekar was later deported to Norway and is under investigation by authorities there.

The Kurds allegedly worked with the imams in Milan and Cremona to radicalize young Muslims and send them to the battlefields of northeastern Iraq, according to court documents. The Kurds also made money by smuggling illegal immigrants, including extremists, into Europe, police say.

The two Kurds were "dedicated to the logistical support and finance of the group and the provision of false documents," a prosecutor's report states. "The network took advantage of a logistical structure in Turkey and Syria, managed by a Kurd known as Mullah Fuad, who assisted the passage of volunteers into Iraqi territory via smugglers."

Wiretaps in recent months contain detailed conversations in which Fuad organized the flow of "brothers" to Iraq via the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo.

As one recruit prepared to depart Milan, an Egyptian recruiter gave him Fuad's number in Syria and said: "I've talked to [the mullah] about your work ... understand? Before you get to the wall and before you start the work, contact me."

Call from 'The Wall'

The reference to "the wall" is code for the Iraqi border, investigators say. The Italian investigation benefited from intelligence passed on by U.S. authorities, who in December provided numbers of half a dozen Thuraya satellite phones used by suspects in Iraq. Among them was one used by Zarqawi's top lieutenant at the Ansar camps, documents show.

U.S. law enforcement also warned in December that the Zarqawi network was intent on "committing terrorist attacks with nonconventional weapons, including chemical or toxic agents, in the United States, diverse European countries including the United Kingdom, and the Middle East," court documents show. Several dozen arrests in Britain, France and other countries during the last six months were made with the intent of blocking plots by Zarqawi operatives, who police say want to make their mark with an unprecedented chemical or biological attack.

Zarqawi and his aides supervised his network from a refuge in Iran, where they remain, investigators say.

"I don't think he spent much time in Iraq," an Italian law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "His lieutenants ran the activity at the Ansar camps."

U.S. and Italian investigators determined that the suspects in Italy repeatedly communicated with the alleged terrorists using the satellite phones

in the Ansar stronghold. In a nimble bit of subterfuge Jan. 28, police stopped an Egyptian recruiter on the street in Milan for a feigned immigration check, then surreptitiously copied phone numbers from his address book, according to documents. The numbers were in code: once deciphered, they corresponded exactly with the phone numbers of Zarqawi's henchmen in northeastern Iraq, police say.

Widespread Network

Phone intercepts allowed investigators in Cremona to track Drissi, the 38-year-old librarian at the mosque here, as he allegedly prepared for jihad four months ago. He embarked on the journey with the help of a widespread, convoluted network that is typical of Islamic extremism.

On Dec. 13, Drissi went to a phone booth at the train station and called Iraq to announce his imminent departure via Syria and Iran, according to a transcript. When he was told of the death of a friend in combat, Drissi exclaimed: "May God accept him among the martyrs!"

Drissi, his wife and two children left Dec. 24 on a flight for Damascus. It was not unusual for trainees to bring their families, who were housed in Kurmal and other villages on Ansar's turf.

Two weeks later, Drissi had made it as far as Iran. He enlisted Trabelsi back in Cremona to advise the Ansar militants that he was on his way, according to documents. Drissi also contacted associates in Germany for help in getting money sent to him.

On March 11, Trabelsi got through to Drissi in Kurdish territory on a satellite phone. They exulted when they heard one another's voices, but Drissi alluded to dark events ahead.

"I think that a big bomb is coming, do you understand?" Drissi said. Investigators think that this could be a reference either to an impending terrorist plot or to the U.S. offensive against Iraq that was days away.

As the imminence of the war brought more recruits from Italy to the Ansar stronghold, Drissi told Trabelsi it was no time for amateurs, according to the transcript of a call three days later.

"Listen, there's one here who wants to go there," Trabelsi said.

"Who is it — Kamel?"

"Yes."

"No, that one's no good!" Drissi exclaimed. He added: "If there's someone good, send him by another route. Ask if there's people who want to come and then send them."

Although prosecutors say the conversations are explicitly incriminating, Trabelsi's lawyer denies charges of terrorism. As strict Muslims, Drissi and Trabelsi simply admired Ansar al Islam's campaign to impose Taliban-style fundamentalism in northern Iraq, said the lawyer, Franco Antoneoli.

Drissi took his family to Ansar territory as part of a spiritual mission, not a military one, Antoneoli said. Trabelsi sent about $1,500 to Iraq because Drissi had asked him to sell his property and forward the money to help sustain his pilgrimage, the lawyer said.

"For a good Muslim, it was a way of getting closer to God," Antoneoli said. "A world of pure Islam. Yes, it was a zone controlled by Ansar al Islam. They talk about war and attacks on the phone. But Drissi did not train or fight with them."

As for Trabelsi, 33, his lawyer said he has a wife and three children, has spent 10 years in Italy and works as a manual laborer. The imam lived in a weathered brick building on a narrow, quiet street about two blocks from the Stradivarius museum here. He is a religious leader in a community of North Africans who have been drawn to the thriving small cities of the Po Valley in part by jobs in industry and agriculture.

Trabelsi denies being a terrorist recruiter, though he has "very strong sentiments that are anti-American, pro-Taliban, pro-Osama bin Laden and pro-Palestinian," Antoneoli said. "But that's not a crime."

Trabelsi and the others are charged with terrorist activity, providing fraudulent documents and aiding illegal immigration. If they go to trial, they will have to explain their contacts with a wild corner of Iraq where combat has wiped out their dreams of jihad or a fundamentalist sanctuary.

It is likely that picturesque, seemingly sleepy Cremona will figure into their stories.

After Kurdish troops and U.S. Army Special Forces overran Ansar al Islam's stronghold, they recovered at least two Italian identity documents belonging to the group's Arab fighters. One of them was a 20-year-old Moroccan, Sayed Hamsi, who is believed to have died in combat.

His identity card was issued Jan. 9, 2001, by the city of Cremona.

Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman, in northern Iraq, contributed to this report.

 

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