AS THE WAR with Saddam’s Iraq approached, a small group of terrorists in Kurdish-controlled Iraq garnered a significant amount of news coverage. Senior-level Bush administration officials had claimed that this group, Ansar al Islam, represented a key link between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. There was evidence, after all, that Saddam’s intelligence operatives funded and supplied the al Qaeda terrorists who joined this group’s ranks in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. That evidence was hotly contested for months until the story of Ansar al Islam gradually receded from the headlines. Today, the group is hardly even mentioned–if at all–in above-the-fold stories by the U.S. press.
Surprisingly, the European press tells a different story. Scanning press accounts from around Europe, the terrorist group most frequently named, besides al Qaeda, is Ansar al Islam.
