IN A LETTER WRITTEN to the al Qaeda leadership in early 2004, Abu Musab Zarqawi described the Iraqi Kurds in less than favorable terms. As far as Zarqawi was concerned, they were “a Trojan horse” who had opened their land to the Jews and established a society that served as the antithesis to his extremist conception of Islam. There are many reasons, however, to suspect that bin Laden differed with the man he would later name as his representative in Iraqi Kurdistan in this view.
While the puritanical strains of Islam favored by bin Laden and Zarqawi hold little popular appeal to most Iraqi Kurds, al Qaeda’s interest in exploiting the region runs deep. According to a former Ansar al-Islam commander who was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor under the pseudonym Rebwar Kadr Said, the links between Kurdistan’s Islamist minority and what would later become al Qaeda run all the way back to the 1980s in Afghanistan, when bin Laden’s mentor, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, took aside two men (a Kurdish Islamist named Faraj Ahmad Najmuddin and a Palestinian) and told his followers to look after the two groups that both men represented, effectively placing the fate of the Kurds on par with that of Palestinians in the eyes of Azzam’s followers.
