- DUBAI (AFP) - Iraqi Deputy
Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said that Baghdad, far from "supporting
terrorism" as President George W. Bush has claimed, had given rebel
Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani weapons to fight militants linked to the
Al-Qaeda terror network in northern Iraq.
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- Whatever "remnants" of Al-Qaeda are in Iraq
can be found in the province of Suleimaniya, which is held by Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and outside Baghdad's control, he told
Dubai-based Saudi-owned MBC television.
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- "Why didn't US officials question Talabani about
the Islamist radicals when he recently met them in Washington?" Aziz
asked.
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- The PUK leader, whose faction shares control of the Western-protected
Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP),
had sought Baghdad's help to combat the Al-Qaeda extremists and "we
gave him weapons and equipment," Aziz said.
-
- The PUK has clashed in recent months with Islamist extremists
in the part of Iraqi Kurdistan it controls, pushing them back to Biara,
which borders Iran.
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- A PUK spokesman told AFP in May that the extremists were
affiliated with "Ansar al-Islam" (Supporters of Islam), which
comprises a number of groupings, including 200 to 300 members of the so-called
Jund al-Islam (Soldiers of Islam).
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- The fundamentalists are suspected of being responsible
for a series of recent incidents, including bomb blasts, in the Kurdish
enclave, which has been off limits to the Baghdad government since the
end of the 1991 Gulf War.
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- Aziz rejected the charge that Iraq supported terror because
it gave financial aid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, saying
the Palestinians were not terrorists but freedom fighters, and Baghdad
was "proud" to help them.
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- The Iraqi official was commenting on Bush's speech to
the UN General Assembly on Thursday in which he warned that US military
action was "unavoidable" unless Baghdad scrapped probibited weapons
it allegedly possesses.
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