The US is stepping up bombardment of Ansar al-Islam, alleged allies of al-Qaeda, Lynne O'Donnell reports from Khalifan
Nabi Aga long ago washed his hands of his youngest son, Azad, and sheds no tears at the thought that American Special Forces are closing in on his mountain hideout with the one aim of wiping him and his fellow radical Islamists off the face of the Earth.
The heartbreak Mr Nabi felt as he watched his son slip away from him into the hands of Ansar al-Islam has long faded, he said.
"I believe that my son, and all the people with him who follow the Ansar, should be wiped out," Mr Nabi said yesterday as he made the motion of rubbing his palms together to wipe away imaginary dirt.
"Like me, many people around here are even happier with the fact that the United States is attacking Ansar, more even than with the attacks on Saddam. We want this blight removed from this Earth."
Hundreds of American Special Forces, backed by 10,000 members of the Kurdish militia controlled by the regional warlord, Jalal Talibani, are this weekend pounding Ansar positions in the snowcapped mountains above the Halabja Plain. It is part of an ongoing campaign to destroy the radical group believed to have links to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Dug in 10km south of the sharp ridge which conceals Ansar positions near the Iranian border, Special Ops and their Kurdish fellow-fighters were yesterday sending round after round of heavy mortar fire whistling over the mountain-top.
The mortar barrage was backed by air strikes as the men on the ground called in B-52s from the Persian Gulf to bomb the Ansar into oblivion.
So far, six settlements have been bombed as the Americans target both Ansar and an affiliated Islamic group called Khormali. Both are believed to be linked, via Iran, to bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, and have thus been branded by the White House as terrorist organisations targeted for destruction.
The peshmerga, part of the militia controlled by Mr Talibani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which runs the region, have an intimate knowledge of the rugged mountain range and are helping to hunt down the extremists, who have taken over a network of caves. Some are believed to have fled into Iranian territory.
For days, the city of Halabja, a centre of underground extremism, has been closed to Westerners, who authorities believe are being targeted by Ansar and others, and no one is permitted to leave without first passing through checkpoints. Two suicide-bombers have detonated their deadly payloads in the past 10 days, and another was caught earlier this week, strapped with dynamite, as he was trying to leave the city.
The anti-Ansar campaign has absorbed most of the American fire-power that has landed in PUK territory around the city of Sulemaniyeh in the past 10 days, according to the PUK's Sadi Ahmed Pire.
Mr Sadi estimated Ansar's fighters at 700, and the Khormal's at 1,500-2,000, including more than 150 foreigners - Arab Afghans, North Africans, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians, all former Taliban fighters who fled through Iran into Iraq after the Afghan war, he said.
It is the presence of the foreigners that has convinced Kurdish leaders and the US administration of close links between the extremist groups and bin Laden. The groups are believed to have helped ferry the ingredients of chemical weaponry through Iran to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
Mr Sadi said that crude chemical laboratories had been found in caves in the Biara area near the Iraq-Iran border, where Ansar had taken control of nine villages where it imposed extreme Islamic Shariah law.
Ansar also sent fighters to training camps in Khandahar and Tora Bora in Afghanistan, he said, to train with arms, explosives and "on limited chemical subjects." This cosy relationship was also directly tied to the Baghdad regime of Saddam Hussein, Mr Sadi said, naming Abu Abdullah Shafhy as an Iraqi agent with close ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden's deputy.
It was under the influence of al-Zawahiri, who believed radical Islam should be taken to the grassroots, that extremism - under a range of names that turned into Ansar and Khormal only a couple of years ago - took root in the remote hillside villages of the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq.
The experience in the village of Khalifan saw a miserable marriage for both the residents and the radicals, according to the village mayor, Hamad Issa, who said the radicals left in 2000 after eight years of trying to wrest control of Khalifan's affairs from the Kurdistan Democratic Party and force its small and impoverished population to adopt the values of conservative Islam like that practised in Iran and the Taliban's Afghanistan.
Women were forced to wear the veil and girls were not permitted to go to school; men and women were segregated in public, men had to grow beards. All work and commerce had to stop five times a day for prayer. Families were threatened with violence if they accepted assistance from the "infidel" UN food-for-oil programme.