In Washington, officials began to view the group as a threat to U.S. interests after seeing evidence that it gave shelter to al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan when U.S. attacks began there in October 2001.
In the early days of the Iraq war, U.S. troops and Kurdish allies swept into Ansar's enclave in northern Iraq. U.S. officials estimated that 250 to 700 of the group's fighters were killed.
This TV image shows victims of Feb. 1, 2004, suicide bombings in Irbil that killed at least 100. Sweden arrested four men in connection with the attack.
(Kurdsat Via AP Television)
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Since then, Ansar has regrouped and become stronger, with many recruits coming from outside Iraq. The State Department reported last April that membership levels had rebounded to 700 to 1,000 fighters. Ansar gained a quick foothold in Europe because it tapped into pre-existing networks on the continent, according to a review of arrests of its operatives.
In 2003, Italian police detained a dozen suspected Ansar supporters and accused them of smuggling an estimated 200 Islamic radicals from Europe into Iraq.
A key figure in that cell was Abderrazak Mahdjoub, an Algerian immigrant who had been investigated previously by German and Spanish officials for ties to the al Qaeda cell from Hamburg that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States.
Mahdjoub and three other Algerian men were arrested in Syria in March 2003, days before the start of the war in Iraq. They were deported to Germany, but it took European investigators several months to realize that the reason the men were in Syria was to set up a pipeline to funnel foreign fighters into Iraq.
According to documents filed at a court in Milan, the cell members had been operating in Italy since at least July 2001, though investigators do not believe that the cell established connections to Ansar until later.
Six of the suspects, including Mahdjoub, are scheduled to go on trial this month in Milan. Indictments accuse them of "sending militants to war zones to sustain terrorist activities" and raising money for Ansar. Last month, a judge threw out terrorism charges filed against three other suspects in the case, saying their actions in Iraq amounted only to guerrilla warfare by a resistance movement, not terrorism.
The discovery of the cell in Milan enabled European officials to track down Ansar operatives in several other countries. According to court records, one of the suspects arrested in Italy, a Kurdish immigrant named Mohammed Tahir Hamid, has provided investigators with the names of Ansar members in Norway, Germany, Sweden and Britain.
Search Moves North
Information from the Milan case soon led investigators north to Munich.
On Dec. 3, 2003, German police arrested a 30-year-old Kurdish immigrant at the Munich train station and accused him of smuggling a dozen fighters into Iraq and of helping wounded Ansar members leave the war zone and bringing them clandestinely into Europe to receive medical treatment.
The suspect, Lokman Amin Mohammed, was indicted last year on charges of smuggling more than 20 Iraqis into Europe, most of them before the invasion. He is also charged with belonging to Ansar, which the German government formally listed as a terrorist organization last summer. He is scheduled to go on trial in March.
In one of the smuggling cases, court records allege, Mohammed helped an Ansar bomb expert named Ali Fadhil leave Iraq after he lost his hands in an explosion in September 2003. Mohammed arranged for the man to be smuggled along a circuitous route from Milan to Rome, then to Paris and finally London, where he received medical treatment, records say.
Investigators have been unable to find the bomb maker and it is unclear if he is in Europe.
