Gill Doyle points to this article in the New York Times on the increasingly important role of Ansar al-Islam in coordinating resistance in Iraq:

In much the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel, the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier, Iraqi officials and others say. [..]

Iraqi officials say they expect a broad spectrum of Muslim militants to flood Iraq. They believe that Ansar al-Islam, a small fundamentalist group believed to have links with Al Qaeda, forms the backbone of the underground network. The group was forced out of northern Iraq by a huge attack during the war.

Mullah Mustapha Kreikar, the founding spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, said in an interview on Sunday with LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, that the fight in Iraq would be the culmination of all Muslim efforts since the Islamic caliphate collapsed in the early 20th century with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. "There is no difference between this occupation and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979," he said from Norway, where he has political asylum. [..]

But the main group organizing an underground route of safe houses and coordinating the various efforts is believed to be Ansar al-Islam, or the Islamic Partisans in English, whose suspected ties to Al Qaeda were among the reasons the Bush administration used to justify the war against Iraq. Although initially a strictly Kurdish organization, its ranks swelled with Arab fighters after the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001.

Note Krekar's full endorsement of the attacks on American forces in Iraq, and his ultimate goal of restoring the Islamic caliphate. A search confirms that Krekar has never mentioned anything about restoring the caliphate to the Norwegian media. Why not? Because it is also Osama bin Laden's goal?

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