A report in the Observer says that soldiers of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (which goes by the unfortunate acronym of PUK) are preparing to attack an Islamic militant group known as Ansar al Islam, an offshoot of Al Qaeda that is being given sanctuary by Iraq and Iran: Kurdish guerrillas poised to fire first shots in war on Iraq.

Al-Ansar’s connections to Saddam’s regime raise the possibility of linking the Iraqi dictator and the 11 September attacks. PUK sources say prisoners have attested to a link between al-Ansar and Iraqi intelligence. Their leaders and many men fought in Afghanistan. According to Akbar San Ahmed, the peshmerga commander for Halabja, documents found on the body of an al-Ansar fighter after a battle last September, when 42 peshmerga prisoners were massacred, included the words: ‘This is a gift to bin Laden.’

In jail in Sulaimaniya, the PUK holds a man convicted of being an Iraqi agent. An Iranian Arab, he has told them he smuggled arms from Baghdad to bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and drugs from al-Qaeda that were used to buy more arms.

The man, Muhammed Mansour Shahab Ali, 27, talks nervously. In an interview with The Observer , he said he met bin Laden four times and carried out three murders for him. The interview was conducted in the presence of PUK officials and there is no way of checking its veracity.

Apart from armaments, Shahab Ali claims that in 2000 he smuggled 30 refrigerator motors, which he believes were filled with a gas, from Iraq to bin Laden.