
Mullah Krekar (7 July 1956-) was the founder of the Ansar al-Islam Salafist insurgent group in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq. In 1991, he found political asylum in Norway, where he founded the Ansar al-Islam group in exile. He was labelled as a terrorist because his group's actions during the Iraq War and because of his goal of creating an Islamic caliphate ruled by notable Islamist terrorists, and on 26 March 2012 he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for making death threats.
Biography[]
Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad was born in the city of Sulaymaniyah, Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraq to a family of Sunni Muslim Kurds. He was an imam before he fled from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 after the failed Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein and Ba'athist Iraq, and he headed to Norway as a refugee. In September 2001, he founded the Ansar al-Islam militant group, which implemented sharia law in Kurdistan and was allegedly used by Saddam as a means to control events in Iraqi Kurdistan. Krekar's group worked together with al-Qaeda and was responsible for terrorist attacks and attacks against the Iraqi government and the MNF-I coalition forces during the Iraq War. In February 2003, an expulsion order was signed against him, but Norway refused to extradite him to Iraq unless they ensured that he would not face torture or execution, but on 8 November 2007 he was labelled as a "danger to national security". On 26 March 2012 he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for threatening to kill Norwegian politicians and Kurds if they threatened political action against him.