Mullah Krekar

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Mullah Krekar at a demonstration against the burning of the Koran in Oslo, March 2, 2012

Nadschm ad-Din Faraj Ahmad ( Arabic نجم الدين فرج أحمد) alias Mullah Krekar (* 1956 in Sulaimaniyya , Iraq ) is a Kurdish Islamist leader.

Life

Born in Sulaimaniyya in 1956, he first studied Arabic before moving to Pakistan in 1983 , where he studied Islamic law ( Fiqh ) and taught for a short time. He was strongly influenced by Abdallah Azzam , who taught there , the pioneer of modern jihad and mentor of Osama bin Laden .

In 1988 Krekar returned to Kurdistan and joined the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan , where he was entrusted with military leadership tasks. However, he fled to Norway in 1991 , which granted him political asylum . Nonetheless, over the next few years he appeared again and again in Kurdistan and after the merger of an Islamist splinter group, Islah (renewal) led by him, with the group Jund al-Islam, on December 10, 2001, he took over the leadership of the group Ansar al-Islam (helpers of Islam), under whose rule an Islamist order similar to that of the Taliban was established in northeast Iraq .

In Norway he set up his own mosque and foundation and eventually switched to agitation and fundraising among Kurdish asylum seekers in Europe . Krekar was arrested in the Netherlands in September 2002 on the basis of an international arrest warrant . Although he u. a. was interrogated by FBI officials, the US did not file an extradition request. It was done instead by Jordan on allegations of murder conspiracy and drug trafficking . In February 2003, Ansar al-Islam officially stripped him of his leadership. Krekar was deported to Norway in 2003, where he was detained until February 17, 2004. In June 2004 he was placed under house arrest. A court decision of April 19, 2005 to deport him to Iraq has so far failed because of the political situation in Iraq and the possible death penalty there.

In March 2012, an Oslo court sentenced Krekar to five years in prison. The reason for this was that Krekar had issued death threats against, among others, Norway's opposition leader and later Prime Minister Erna Solberg . The appellate court reduced his sentence to 2 years and 10 months in December.

A Norwegian court in October 2016 allowed Ahmad to extradite him to Italy, where he was accused of having built a network that recruited fighters in Europe to overthrow the Kurdish part of Iraq. The remnants of his Ansar al-Islam joined the terrorist organization Islamic State in 2014 .

literature

  • Brisard, Jean-Charles: The new face of Al-Qaida, Berlin 2005. ISBN 3-549-07266-X
  • Mullah Kreker (2004). Med egne ord ("In my own words"), autobiography. Oslo: Aschehoug. 246 pp. ISBN 82-03-22968-9 . Translated from Arabic .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Kurdish Islamist Leader Arrested" . derStandard.at , March 27, 2012
  2. ^ "Krekar's prison term reduced" . December 6, 2012
  3. ↑ Associated Press: "Court: Iraqi cleric Mullah Krekar can be extradited to Italy" Washington Post, October 21, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Krekar, mullah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ahmad, Nadschm ad-Din Faraj
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kurdish-Iraqi founder of Ansar al-Islam
DATE OF BIRTH 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Sulaimaniyya