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Talabanis Mosul Hq Attacked Al Qaeda

Juan Cole 09/26/2003

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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.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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