Ansar opens disputed camp Foreign

In a crude attempt at public relations, fighters draped in grenades and brandishing Kalashnikovs allowed journalists to inspect a compound in northern Iraq on Saturday that U.S. Secretary of State Colin M. Powell identified in a satellite photograph before the UN Security Council last week as a terrorist haven for manufacturing chemical agents.

The fighters, members of the group known as Ansar Al Islam, disputed Powell's charges that they are linked to Al Qaida and masterminding a poison factory and training camp to attack Western targets from bases scattered across the snow-dusted mountains of this region.

"You can search as you like. There are no chemicals here," Ansar spokesman Ayub Khidir told the group of journalists, who were escorted by a bullet-pocked truck to a mountain crease flecked with grazing sheep and minefields.

A collection of half-finished cinderblock buildings, the compound is home to the Victory Brigade, which has been battling forces of the autonomous Kurdish enclave in Iraq along the border with Iran.

The buildings and the fighters here – wearing ripped sneakers and old boots – were thrust into the world's spotlight when Powell told the Security Council that Ansar is a link between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussain.

Powell said the group, with assistance from operatives of Osama bin Laden, is making toxins and training terrorists. The satellite picture unnerved Ansar, which believes it would now be a likely target in the event of a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Ansar officials denied connections to Al Qaida or any foreign countries, including Iran. Contrary to Kurdish and U.S. intelligence, the group said there are no Arabs or Afghans among its brigades, totaling between 400 and 700 fighters. Some fighters, however, could be overheard whispering in Arabic.

Ansar members shied away from questions about the group's philosophy, funding and terrorist tactics. When asked if he admired bin Laden, one fighter said: "We admire all Muslims. They are our brothers."

Ansar has orchestrated a number of grisly attacks and assassination attempts from its redoubts in the Kurdish enclave, protected from Saddam's forces by a no-fly zone patrolled by American and British warplanes.

They are fighting the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which governs the eastern portion of northern Iraq, for control of about a dozen villages.

Ansar has produced videotapes of its killings and mutilations of Kurdish soldiers, and it has vowed holy war against the secular world.

After deliberating for a few minutes at a checkpoint bunker in their territory, the fighters invited journalists for a visit.

The rust-coloured dirt road to the compound rose along mountain ridges, past an Ansar graveyard and valleys of winding stone fences and ruins of villages and mosques destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Some of the fighters behind barbed wire seemed confused when visitors entered the compound.

The visit provided a brief glimpse into a group that has been both secretive and brutal since it was founded in 2001. Only a few fighters were allowed to speak. Journalists were permitted to roam through certain buildings; others were off limits.

It had been three days since Powell's presentation at the United Nations, and if the group had been manufacturing chemical agents and biotoxins, they could have been removed. In any case, there were no visible traces of chemicals and no signs of laboratory equipment or industrial capability.

"We reject the Powell speech," said Sarchi Ibrahim, a fighter with a neat beard and clean baggy trousers. "Do you think we could prepare chemical weapons here? We've been attacked by Hussain's chemical weapons in 1988. Do you think we want that again? The interest of the U.S. is to colonise Iraq and get out oil.