Al-Qaeda's Opening Shot in Iraq War (?)

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Well this doesn't appear to me to be absolutely conclusive, but it does seem to lend some degree of additional credibility to the theory that al Qaeda and Iraq are working together in some ways.

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Al Qaeda’s Opening Shot in Iraq War

DEBKAfile Military-Intelligence Exclusive

February 9, 2003, 5:50 PM (GMT+02:00)

Saturday night, February 8, in the Iraqi-Kurdish city of Suleimaniyeh, al Qaeda and Iraqi military intelligence fired their first shot of the US-Iraq war - by assassination. They used their shared surrogate, the extremist Kurdish Ansar al-Islam of northeast Iraq, to eliminate the top command of the pro-American Patriotic Union of Iraqi Kurdistan’s fighting militia.

The three-way collaboration between Baghdad, al Qaeda and the Kurdish fundamentalist terrorists provided a live and incontrovertible smoking gun. The price was heavy, a grave setback for US war plans...

...The wiping out the PUK high command in Suleimaniyeh has alerted Western counter-terror agencies to the possibility of its being the precursor for another massive al Qaeda strike against the United States or its allies. Al Qaeda has taken advantage of the presence of its operatives in a given territory to hit pro-American military leaders present in the same place. One such operative is Abu Musaab al Zarqawi, who is in charge of terrorist activity in Europe and the Middle East, as well as the worldwide distribution of the network’s stock of chemical, biological and radioactive weapons. It is therefore possible that the murder of the Kurdish commanders signals the next major al Qaeda outrage.

According to our sources, Ansar al-Islam is rife both with Zarqawi’s men and also Iraqi military intelligence officers, under the command Colonel Abu Wale. These officers have been training al Qaeda operatives in the use of forbidden weapons. In a special DEBKAfile report published on Saturday, February 8, the secret al Qaeda base for its joint operations with Iraqi military intelligence was revealed as being located in the town of Tajdori, 150 km northeast of Baghdad. (end excerpt)

http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=257