LONDON, Aug 23 (AFP) - A radical armed Islamist group with links to Tehran and Baghdad has helped the Al-Qaeda organisation establish an international terrorist training camp in northern Iraq, The Guardian reported Friday.

Intelligence officers in the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq told the British daily that the Ansar al-Islam group was harbouring up to 150 Al-Qaeda members in a string of villages it controls along the Iraq-Iran border.

Most of them fled Afghanistan after the US-led offensive following the September 11 attacks on America, for which Al-Qaeda has been blamed, the left-of-centre paper said.

Officials from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls part of northeast Iraq, told the Guardian that recruits were also making their way to the area from Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

"They are being trained for terrorist operations within the Kurdish region and beyond, possibly Europe," one official said.

Washington hawks arguing for an invasion of Iraq have seized on the allegations of an al-Qaeda presence as evidence of a link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, and the September 11 attacks, the Guardian said.

The paper added, however, that the PUK claims had prompted some scepticism because of the group's interest in drawing the US into a conflict with Baghdad.

Two Kurdish parties told Nampa-AFP Thursday that Iran was amassing troops on its border with Iraq in case of a US invasion to topple Saddam.

Iran has also closed its border crossing to the northern Iraqi Kurdish enclave, which is protected from Saddam by US and British air patrols, said Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan (RUK) chief Hussein Yazdanpana, who lives in the eastern city of Arbil.

Yazdanpana accused Iran of also deploying militant bands like the Islamist Ansar al-Islam.

The KDP is one of two major Kurdish parties that control the Western-protected enclave in northern Iraq, which has been off-limits to the Baghdad government since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

Iran on Wednesday said its military was ready for any invasion of Iraq by its longtime foe, the United States.

pk/pvh Nampa-AFP WEB story ENDS (NAMPA 230305)