Hans Rustad Det har dukket opp to nye islamske partier i Kurdistan, og ett av dem har bånd til Ansar al-Islam. Partiene profiterer på at folk er fed up med de to store, KDP og PUK.
Det kan forklare hvorfor mullah Krekar plutselig er blitt interessert i å reise tilbake.
ARBIL, IRAQ AND LONDON – – The creation of a new constitution for Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region was meant to be relatively straightforward. But instead, Kurdish Islamic parties have courted controversy by calling a greater role for sharia, or Islamic law.
«The Kurds are a Muslim nation and we have to follow Islam,» says Mohammed Ahmed, a member of parliament for the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), the largest Kurdish Islamic party in the regional parliament, the Kurdistan National Assembly.
Such calls may well go unheeded by secular parties which hold 80 percent of seats in the parliament, where a cross-party committee is now drawing up a draft constitution.
However, the demands for Islamic law reflect the growing popularity of Islamic parties like the KIU and its smaller, more radical rival Komala, which was once allied with the Al-Qaeda’s Kurdish offshoot Ansar Al-Islam. While unlikely to change the political power balance in Kurdistan any time soon, the Islamic parties may cultivate the ground for more radical ideas to take root.
«The KIU could become an organization that germinates radicals,» says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East Project Director at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG). «People will join it and then later feel that it doesn’t go far enough and then go on to join other more radical groups.»
Such radicalization could pose problems for the US, which relies heavily on the Iraq’s Kurds’ long-standing opposition to radical Islamic groups to gather intelligence against Arab and Islamic insurgents. The US now plans to build a network of long-term military bases in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq – known as Kurdistan.
