Talabanis Mosul Hq Attacked Al Qaeda

Posted on 09/26/2003 by Juan

Talabani’s Mosul HQ Attacked; Al-Qaeda Connection

Gunmen sprayed machine gun fire at the party offices in Mosul of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Jalal Talabani at 9 pm Thursday night Iraqi time, according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat. No one was wounded in the attack. Party officials blamed the attack on Ansar al-Islam, a small radical Sunni Kurdish faction that appears to have shadowy links to al-Qaeda. They said that Mosul is hospitable to such radical Sunni movements because it has an old Islamist tradition, going back decades to the beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood there. (The flaw in this argument is that those traditions are among Arabs, whereas Ansar al-Islam, a much more recent phenomenon, is Kurdish). The fair number of violent incidents in Mosul gives the lie to the notion that only the Sunni Arab triangle in Iraq is a security problem. On Wednesday assailants had tossed a grenade into a movie theater.

0 Retweet 0 Share 0 StumbleUpon 0 Printer Friendly Send via email

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off | Print

Comments are closed.

  • Juan Cole

    Juan Cole

    Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.

    Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.

  • IC Destinations



  • Keep up with Informed Comment at:

  • Donate to Global Americana Institute

    Donate to the Global Americana Institute to support the translation into Arabic of books about America.
  • Friends and Interlocutors:

  • Recent Posts

  • Recent Comments

  • Archives

  • Categories