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Hello !
Recent Appearances... Rantburg

Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Car bomb explodes in Christian area of Beirut
2005-09-17
A powerful bomb went off in a Christian neighborhood of eastern Beirut late Friday, wounding at least three people and sending soldiers scrambling to the scene. The blast detonated just before midnight near a bank, completely destroying a car. But it was not clear if the bomb was placed in the vehicle, under it or near it. Two other cars were also damaged.
At least no one appears to have been killed.
The explosion was the latest in a series of blasts that have shaken Beirut, some killing or wounding prominent politicians and others hitting public areas and causing panic. It came days after a U.N. investigator visited Damascus to set up interviews with top Syrian officials over the most notorious of the bomb blasts — a Feb. 14 explosion that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 20 other people. The U.N. team has already accused four senior Lebanese security officials who carried out Syrian policy in the country. Many in Rantburg Lebanon accuse Syria in the killings of Hariri and other anti-Damascus figures, a charge Syria denies. Lebanese have expressed fears of more bombings as the U.N. investigation pushes forward — particularly if it points a finger directly at Syria in Hariri's slaying.

Maybe I'm not Byzantine enough, but I can't for the life of me figure the reasoning, if any, behind these car booms. At first they made a bit of convoluted sense, in that they "demonstrated" that Leb's an unstable mix and that best for all concerned would be if Syria returned and maintained order. There have been periodic booms ever since the end of the civil war and I'm assuming most of those were orchestrated by Syria or her domestic allies for internal political reasons, as appears to have been the case with Hariri. A few — not as many as were attributed — were probably the Mossad's work.

But Syria's been under intensifying scrutiny since the Hariri killing, which I believe to have been miscalculated "business as usual" on the part of the Syrian intel guys. This latest two or three booms accomplishes nothing but making things worse for Syria. That might mean they're done by the Mossad, which obviously has an interest in destabilizing Syria, but the risks with competent investigators like Mehlis in the neighborhood outweigh the minimal gains, since Syria's destabilizing nicely on its own. Should one of the latest series of explosions be hung on Israel, by inference they all will and the Leb independence movement will be discredited.

To me, that leaves the Islamists, probably first cousins to the Dinnieh group and Jund al-Shams. But arguing against them is the fact that none of the post-Hariri booms have been hung on anyone. And Islamists have the habit of not only claiming credit for their depredations, but also claiming credit for other people's. So I'll remain confused, at least until something breaks...
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Iraq-Jordan
MEMRI Ticker: One of Jund al-Shams founders killed at Qaim
2005-07-16
Ain-Al-Yaqeen stated on July 1st that: 'The right hand man of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is thought to have died in the same U.S. raid, on the town of al-Qaim near the Syrian border, in which the wanted Saudi Abdullah Rushud lost his life. Abu al-Ghadiya al-Suri's death was also reported by the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, which cited a source close to al-Qaida as confirming that al-Suri was killed several days ago, around the time Rushud's death was announced in a statement attributed to al-Zarqawi. Abu al-Ghadiya al-Suri is considered one of the leading members of the Jund al-Sham organization, founded with al-Zarqawi in 1999 in Herat. He is considered the brains behind al-Zarqawi's group.' (Ain-al-Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 7/1/05)
I'm trying to figure just how many organizations Zark controls. There's Jund al-Shams, al-Tawhid, Ansar al-Islam, the Omar Brigade, and al-Qaeda in Iraq, just off the top of my head.
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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Syria May Have Cockroaches Problem With Extremists
2005-07-07
Syria's recent clashes with militants have raised the prospect that the country — under U.S. pressure to keep insurgents out of Iraq — might also be facing a resurgence of Islamic extremists within its own borders.
"Damn! I laid down with the dawgs and now I'm itching like hell! I wonder what it could be?"
Long-dormant Islamic-based groups that oppose the Syrian regime appear to be taking advantage of the government's tight spot to reassert themselves, some political analysts and outside experts believe. "The more you weaken the regime, the more you give the chance for opposition groups, including Islamic extremists, to regroup," said Nizar Hamzeh, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut who is an expert on Islamic political movements.
"Yeah. Much better to just leave ol' Assad alone, maybe give him some money..."
Syria has gone on the offensive recently, announcing measures to crack down on foreign fighters slipping into Iraq from its territory.
... so as to avoid meeting the Marines up close and personal...
The initiative appears to be an attempt to relieve some pressure from the United States and Iraq, who claim Syria has not done enough.
That's what I just said...
But the series of recent clashes has also highlighted that the extremist groups hold longtime hostility toward the Syrian regime too. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya satellite channel, said the clashes show that al-Qaida "has indeed started its war against Syria."
In that case, Assad's got three choices: Do nothing and hope for the best, the course he'll probably take; surrender and get the hell out while the getting's good, letting the bad guyz take over, followed by us; or dump the terrs and join our side.
Writing in the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper Monday, he noted the irony that the Syrian government and Islamists have cooperated in the past. But such cooperation was only "a marriage of convenience" to achieve certain goals such as confronting U.S. troops in Iraq, and groups such as al-Qaida consider Syria to be an "infidel" regime that needs to be changed, he noted. "They may have slept in the same bed to fight the Americans but what's important for al-Qaida is that it has entered the bedroom and secured a foothold there," he wrote.
"Y'know, I think I might have fleas! Call the Surgeon General!"
There is little question that the militants seem willing to fight the Syrian regime. On Monday, the Syrian government said its security forces had clashed with a band of militants — including former bodyguards of toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein — on a resort mountain overlooking the Syrian capital, Damascus. During the clash, security forces captured a Jordanian suspected militant, Sharif Ayed Saeed al-Smady, and the wife of his brother, said a Syrian official. In an interview with Syrian Television, the wife, Rihab Shahab, said the group was planning terror attacks in Syria and also was preparing to travel to Iraq using forged passports.
"Honey, Brother and I have to go on a little business trip..."
"Can I come along this time? You never take me along on business trips!"
"Well, okay."
"Oh, goody! Where are we going?"
"We're gonna shoot up Syria, and then go to Iraq using forged passports."
The al-Smady brothers, both wanted in Jordan in connection with an armed robbery, are linked to the Jund al-Shams militant group, authorities say. The group is a well-known organization that was set up in Afghanistan by Syrian, Palestinian and Jordanian militants and has links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida's branch in Iraq. The group also has claimed responsibility for an October attack on resort hotels in Sinai, Egypt, that killed 34 people, and for a March bombing at an international school in Qatar that killed a British resident. On Sunday, the day before the mountain clash, the government claimed its forces had killed an Arab extremist near the Lebanese border and arrested 34 other foreign extremists. And last month, Syrian forces raided the hideout of a group of suspected terrorists near Damascus, killing two. Before that raid, security forces had been monitoring a Jund al-Sham cell for several months and broke it up as the group planned to launch bomb attacks in Damascus, authorities said.
"Beirut's okay. Baghdad's okay. We draw the line at Damascus!"
The burgeoning extremism in Syria "is a natural extension" of the increasing radicalism in the region after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, said Syrian legislator Mohammed al-Habash, who also heads the Center for Islamic Studies in Damascus.
"Before the U.S. invasion everything was peachy keen, no radicalism to be found anywhere..."
Syria, a tightly controlled country, has for decades taken a tough line against Islamic extremism: Banning, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood since the early 1980s. But Hamzeh said the crushing of the Brotherhood's leadership then does not mean that its infrastructure was totally destroyed.
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Terror Networks
Behind the new face of terror
2004-05-24
Zarqawi has operated widely. German authorities investigating the Hamburg cell after September 11 came across another terrorist group called al-Tawhid (Unity), made up mainly of Palestinian militants trained in Zarqawi's Afghan camps. Tawhid operatives told investigators they got their start in Europe selling forged documents to militants travelling between the Middle East and western Europe. With the outbreak of war in Iraq, Tawhid converted its alien-smuggling and document forgery ring into a two-way underground link between western Europe and the Middle East. According to press reports, networks in Spain, Italy and Germany send recruits into Iraq via Syria. US military officials in Iraq now blame the most heinous terrorist attacks on "the Zarqawi network". But Zarqawi's alien-smuggling system also dispatches Middle Eastern jihadis into Europe via Spain, Turkey, Italy and Greece. In November 2003, Italian wiretaps recorded two Tawhid operatives speaking of "the jihad part" and its "battalion of 25-26 units" of suicide bombers.

If Zarqawi's underground railroad demonstrates the terrorist uses of illegal immigration, the investigation into the Madrid bombings reveals new connections to Zarqawi every week. Zarqawi's lieutenant, a 36-year-old Moroccan named Amer el Azizi, planned the Madrid terror and is the living link between al-Qa'ida, the Zarqawi network and the Moroccan immigrant cell that set the Madrid bombs. Azizi also organised and presided over the 2001 meeting in Spain where Mohammed Atta and al-Qa'ida leaders put the finishing touches on the September 11 plan. Azizi fled Spain in November 2001 as Spanish authorities dismantled the al-Qa'ida logistics cell. He jetted to Afghanistan via Iran, where Zarqawi's cross-border networks helped him elude the coalition. While falling in with Zarqawi, Azizi kept an eye on Spain and his Moroccan colleagues, who managed to set off bombs in Casablanca in May 2003. Shortly before the Madrid train bombings, Azizi left Iran via Turkey and slipped into Spain to witness the carnage first-hand. He is still at large.

Probably the murkiest and most intriguing feature of this man of mystery is the question of Zarqawi's relations with bin Laden. Although he met with bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, the Jordanian never joined al-Qa'ida. Militants have explained that Tawhid was "especially for Jordanians who did not want to join al-Qa'ida". A confessed Tawhid member even told his interrogators that Zarqawi was "against al-Qa'ida". Shortly after September 11, a fleeing Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the main plotters of the attacks, appealed to Tawhid operatives for a forged visa. He could not come up with ready cash. Told that he did not belong to Tawhid, he was sent packing and eventually into the arms of the Americans.

Zarqawi and bin Laden also disagree over strategy. Zarqawi allegedly constructed his Tawhid network primarily to target Jews and Jordan. This choice reflected both Zarqawi's Palestinian heritage and his dissent from bin Laden's strategy of focusing on the "far enemy" -- the US. In an audiotape released after the recent foiled gas attack in Amman, an individual claiming to be Zarqawi argued that the Jordanian Intelligence Services building was indeed the target, although no chemical attack was planned. Rather, he stated menacingly: "God knows, if we did possess (a chemical bomb), we wouldn't hesitate one second to use it to hit Israeli cities such as Eilat and Tel Aviv."

The Tawhid cell uncovered in Hamburg after September 11 scouted Jewish targets, including businesses and synagogues. Zarqawi's operatives have been implicated in an attack on a Mombasa hotel frequented by Israeli tourists and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli jetliner. He is also suspected to have played a role in the Casablanca bombings of a Jewish community centre and a Spanish social club. In February 2002, a Jordanian court sentenced him in absentia to 15 years' hard labour for his involvement in a failed plot to kill American and Israeli tourists at the turn of the millennium, a scheme co-ordinated with Abu Zubaydah, a top lieutenant of bin Laden. Another Jordanian court sentenced him, again in absentia, to death for the assassination of US diplomat Laurence Foley. He is also the prime suspect in the August 2003 truck bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.

Zarqawi has been associated with other groups besides Tawhid. Most notorious is Ansar al Islam, a largely Kurdish organisation operating out of northern Iraq, which US officials have linked to al-Qa'ida. Before the war, Ansar al Islam ran chemical warfare camps in northern Iraq. Last year, British counter-terrorist investigators traced poisonous ricin found in Manchester to those camps. Zarqawi has been linked with two lesser-known al-Qa'ida splinter groups: Beyyiat el-Imam, implicated in attacks in Israel as well as the November 2003 attack on a synagogue in Turkey; and Jund al-Shams, a Syrian-Jordanian group blamed for the assassination of Foley. He has also been linked to Chechen jihadis, and Indian intelligence says he belongs to Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a Pakistani Sunni group responsible for slaying hundreds of Shias in South Asia.

The slaughter of Shias touches on another Zarqawi beef with bin Laden. While both men follow the strict code of Salafi Islam, which reckons Shias as apostates, bin Laden prides himself on being a unifying figure and has made tactical alliances with Shia groups, meeting several times with Shia militants. Zarqawi, by contrast, favours butchering Shias, calling them "the most evil of mankind . . . the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom". US military officials hold Zarqawi responsible not only for assassinating Shia religious leaders in Iraq but also for the multiple truck bombings of a Shia religious festival in March that killed 143 worshippers.

But although bin Laden and Zarqawi differ on strategy, Zarqawi too cloaks his plans for mass murder in the language of the religious zealot. To Zarqawi "religion is more precious than anything and has priority over lives, wealth and children". He considers Iraq ideal for jihad especially because "it is a stone's throw from the lands of the two holy precincts (Saudi Arabia) and the Al Aqsa (mosque, in Jerusalem). "We know from God's religion that the true, decisive battle between infidelity and Islam is in this land (greater Syria and its surroundings)." On the tape of the beheading of Berg, entitled "Sheikh Abu Musab Zarqawi executes an American with his own hands and promises Bush more", Zarqawi rages: "Where is the compassion, where is the anger for God's religion, and where is the protection for Muslims' pride in the crusaders' jails? The pride of all Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and other jails is worth blood and souls."

The CIA has verified that Zarqawi himself spoke on the tape and personally beheaded Berg. Similarly, the videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2002 was carried out directly by another jihadi leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The latter, like Zarqawi, never swore allegiance to bin Laden. In this bloodthirsty crowd it appears that slitting the throat of an American Jew wins laurels. In January 2004, Iraqi Kurds captured a message from Zarqawi in Iraq to bin Laden. Zarqawi offered bin Laden a chance to expand al-Qa'ida's role in Iraq. Victory, Zarqawi instructed, meant fomenting sectarian war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. There are no indications that bin Laden responded, and there are now signs of co-operation between some Iraqi Shia and Sunni militants. Are bin Laden and Zarqawi running competing terrorist organisations in Iraq? Zarqawi's letter is addressed to a colleague or even a potential competitor rather than to one he regards as his sheikh or emir. He offers darkly: "We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you." Zarqawi gives bin Laden two choices: "If you agree with us . . . we will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders, and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly and in the news media . . . If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil (our) friendship."

Zarqawi exemplifies Sunni terrorism after September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, what some call "al-Qa'ida 2.0". The Western counter-offensive decimated al-Qa'ida's leadership, stripped the organisation of safe havens and training camps, and disrupted its command and control. Former al-Qa'ida subsidiaries became franchises, receiving inspiration from bin Laden's occasional messages but operating independently. Historically speaking, the dynamic of revolutionary movements favours the most radical faction – the Jacobins, not the Girondists, the Bolsheviks, not the Menshiviks. If this dynamic prevails in contemporary Sunni terrorism, Zarqawi represents the future.
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Saddam’s ambassador to al-Qaeda
2004-02-21
A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein’s fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam’s envoy to al Qaeda.

Before recounting details from my January 29 interview, some caution is necessary. Al-Shamari’s account was compelling and filled with specific information that would either make him a skilled and detailed liar or a man with information that the U.S. public needs to hear. My Iraqi escort informed me that al-Shamari has been in prison since March 2002, that U.S. officials have visited him several times, and that his story has remained consistent. There was little language barrier; my Arabic skills allowed me to understand much of what al-Shamari said, even before translation. Finally, subsequent conversations with U.S. government officials in Washington and Baghdad, as well as several articles written well before this one, indicate that al-Shamari’s claims have been echoed by other sources throughout Iraq.

When I walked into the tiny interrogation room, it was midmorning. I had just finished interviews with two other prisoners--both members of Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda affiliate responsible for attacks against Kurdish and Western targets in northern Iraq. The group had been active in a small enclave near Halabja in the Kurdistan region from about September 2001 until the U.S. assault on Iraq last spring, when its Arab and Kurdish fighters fled over the Iranian border, only to return after the war. U.S. officials now suspect Ansar in some of the bloodier attacks against U.S. interests throughout Iraq.

My first question to al-Shamari was whether he was involved in the operations of Ansar al Islam. My translator asked him the question in Arabic, and al-Shamari nodded: "Yes." Al-Shamari, who appears to be in his late twenties, said that his division of the Mukhabarat provided weapons to Ansar, "mostly mortar rounds." This statement echoed an independent Kurdish report from July 2002 alleging that ordnance seized from Ansar al Islam was produced by Saddam’s military and a Guardian article several weeks later alleging that truckloads of arms were shipped to Ansar from areas controlled by Saddam.
[Hack! Caff!] That gun's really smoking...
In addition to weapons, al-Shamari said, the Mukhabarat also helped finance Ansar al Islam. "On one occasion we gave them ten million Swiss dinars [$700,000]," al-Shamari said, referring to the pre-1990 Iraqi currency. On other occasions, the Mukhabarat provided more than that. The assistance, he added, was furnished "every month or two months."
No surprises, only confirmation...
I then picked up a picture of a man known as Abu Wael that I had acquired from Kurdish intelligence. In the course of my research, several sources had claimed that Abu Wael was on Saddam’s payroll and was also an al Qaeda operative, but few had any facts to back up their claim. For example, one Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, stated flatly before the Iraq war, "all information indicates [that Abu Wael] was the link between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime" but neglected to provide any such information. Agence France-Presse after the war cited a Kurdish security chief’s description of Abu Wael as a "key link to Saddam’s former Baath regime" and an "intelligence agent for the ousted president originally from Baghdad." Again, nothing was provided to substantiate this claim. In my own analysis of this group, I could do little but weakly assert that Wael was "reportedly an al Qaeda operative on Saddam’s payroll." The best reporting on Wael came from a March 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who had visited a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq and interviewed Ansar prisoners. He spoke with one Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammed, whom Kurdish intelligence captured while he was on his way to the Ansar enclave. Muhammed told Goldberg that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for Ansar al Islam and "an employee of the Mukhabarat."
Given Abu Wael's travels, that fits well.
"Do you know this man?" I asked al-Shamari. His eyes widened and he smiled. He told me that he knew the man in the picture, but that his graying beard was now completely white. He said that the man was Abu Wael, whose full name is Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani. The prisoner told me that he had worked for Abu Wael, who was the leader of a special intelligence directorate in the Mukhabarat. That directorate provided assistance to Ansar al Islam at the behest of Saddam Hussein, whom Abu Wael had met "four or five times." Al-Shamari added that "Abu Wael’s wife is Izzat al-Douri’s cousin," making him a part of Saddam’s inner circle. Al-Douri, of course, was the deputy chairman of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council, a high-ranking official in Iraq’s armed forces, and Saddam’s righthand man. Originally number six on the most wanted list, he is still believed to be at large in Iraq, and is suspected of coordinating aspects of insurgency against American troops, primarily in the Sunni triangle. Why, I asked, would Saddam task one of his intelligence agents to work with the Kurds, an ethnic group that was an avowed enemy of the Baath regime, and had clashed with Iraqi forces on several occasions? Al-Shamari said that Saddam wanted to create chaos in the pro-American Kurdish region. In other words, he used Ansar al Islam as a tool against the Kurds.
Which is the reason we've come up with for the establishment of Ansar in the Kurdish areas. It wasn't really all that hard to work out, but it's always nice to have your conclusions confirmed...
As an intelligence official for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (one of the two major parties in northern Iraq) explained to me, "Most of the Kurdish fighters in Ansar al Islam didn’t know the link to Saddam." They believed they were fighting a local jihad. Only the high-level lieutenants were aware that Abu Wael was involved.
Which also fits with our opinion that the Kurdish part of Ansar was yokels and hicks, useful for beating up on the local peshmerga, and providing a cover for the presence of the al-Tawhid Arabs...
Al-Shamari also told me that the links between Saddam’s regime and the al Qaeda network went beyond Ansar al Islam. He explained in considerable detail that Saddam actually ordered Abu Wael to organize foreign fighters from outside Iraq to join Ansar. Al-Shamari estimated that some 150 foreign fighters were imported from al Qaeda clusters in Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon to fight with Ansar al Islam’s Kurdish fighters. I asked him who came from Lebanon. "I don’t know the name of the group," he replied. "But the man we worked with was named Abu Aisha." Al-Shamari was likely referring to Bassam Kanj, alias Abu Aisha, who was a little-known militant of the Dinniyeh group, a faction of the Lebanese al Qaeda affiliate Usbat al Ansar. Kanj was killed in a January 2000 battle with Lebanese forces.
The Dinnieh group of Takfiri was clobbered by the Lebanese army when they got out of hand in 2000. But that also implies an earlier presence for what was to become Ansar in Kurdistan.
Al-Shamari said that there was also contact with the Egyptian "Gamaat al-Jihad," which is now seen as the core of al Qaeda’s leadership, as well as with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which bin Laden helped create in 1998 as an alternative to Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Al-Shamari talked of Abu Wael’s links with Turkey’s "Jamaa al-Khilafa"--likely the group also known as the "Union of Islamic Communities" (UIC) or the "Organization of Caliphate State." This terror group, established in 1983 by Cemalettin Kaplan, reportedly met with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997, and later sent cadres there to train. Three years before 9/11, UIC plotted to crash a plane into Ankara’s Ataturk Mausoleum on a day when hundreds of Turkish officials were present.
Kaplan was the "Caliph of Cologne." I thought his Qaeda ties were only peripheral. Goes to show what I know...
Al-Shamari stated that Abu Wael sometimes traveled to meet with these groups. All of them, he added, visited Wael in Iraq and were provided Iraqi visas. This corroborates an interview I had with a senior PUK official in April 2003, who stated that many of the Arab fighters captured or killed during the war held passports with Iraqi visas. Al-Shamari said that importing foreign fighters to train in Iraq was part of his job in the Mukhabarat. The fighters trained in Salman Pak, a facility located some 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. He said that he had personal knowledge of 500 fighters that came through Salman Pak dating back to the late 1990s; they trained in "urban combat, explosives, and car bombs." This account agrees with a White House Background Paper on Iraq dated September 12, 2002, which cited the "highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."
We knew about that, too...
Abu Wael also sent money to the aforementioned al Qaeda affiliates, and to other groups that "worked against the United States." Abu Wael dispensed most of the funds himself, al-Shamari said, but there was also some cooperation with Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Zarqawi, as the prisoner explained, was al Qaeda’s link to Iraq in the same way that Abu Wael was the Iraqi link to al Qaeda. Indeed, Zarqawi (who received medical attention in Baghdad in 2002 for wounds that he suffered from U.S. forces in Afghanistan) and Abu Wael helped Ansar al Islam prepare for the U.S. assault on its small enclave last year. According to al-Shamari, Ansar was given the plan from the top Iraqi leadership: "If the U.S. was to hit [the Ansar base], the fighters were directed to go to Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul . . . Falluja and other places." This statement agreed with a prior prisoner interview I had with the attempted murderer of Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. This second prisoner told me that "Ansar had plans to go south if the U.S. would attack." Al-Shamari said the new group was to be named Jund al-Shams, and would deal mainly in explosives. He believed that Zarqawi and Abu Wael were responsible for some of the attacks against U.S. soldiers in central Iraq. "Their directives were to hit America and American interests," he said.
Al-Shams showed up last June, when Zarqawi was first reporting working from Iran. An article by Matthew Levitt in National Review suggests it's one of the many aliases of al-Tawhid. We should probably be thinking of Tawhid, Shams, al-Sunnah, and whatever else pops up as battalions within a regiment named Ansar al-Islam, commanded by Zarqawi, in itself part of an al-Qaeda division commanded by Saif al-Adel, though that's probably describing it too neatly.
Al-Shamari claimed to have had prior information about al Qaeda attacks in the past. "I knew about the attack on the American in Jordan," he said, referring to the November 2002 assassination of USAID official Lawrence Foley. "Zarqawi," he said, "ordered that man to be killed."
And an al-Qaeda audio tape took credit for the killing. Still any doubt about the connection? Didn't think so.
These are some of the highlights from my interview, which lasted about 45 minutes. I heard one other salient Abu Wael anecdote in an earlier interview during my eight-day trip to Iraq. That interview was with the former tenth-in-command for Ansar al Islam, a man known simply as Qods. In June 2003, just before he was arrested and put in the jail where I met him, Qods said that he saw Abu Wael. After the war, Abu Wael dispatched him from an Ansar safe house in Ravansar, Iran, to deliver a message to his son in Baghdad. The message: Ansar al Islam leaders needed help getting back into Iraq. It was only then, he said, when he met Abu Wael’s son, that he learned of the link between the Baathists and al Qaeda. Qods told me that he was angry with the leaders of Ansar for hiding its ties to Saddam. "Ansar had lots of secret ties between the Baath and Arab leaders," he said. The challenge now is to document the claims of these witnesses about the secret ties between Saddam, al Qaeda, and Abu Wael. A number of U.S. officials have indicated to me that there are other Iraqis who have similar stories to tell. Perhaps they can corroborate Abdul Rahman al-Shamari’s account. Meanwhile, the U.S. deck of cards representing Iraq’s 55 most wanted appears to be one card short. Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani, aka Abu Wael, should be number 56.
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Iraq
About that smoking gun ...
2003-11-15
This is a complete transcript of the Weekly Standard article that details US intelligence on the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection.
OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
And there goes the "hyped intelligence" charge in regards to the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection. A lot of this stuff also comes from the early to late 1990s, long before Bush even thought of running for president.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America’s most determined and dangerous enemies.
Which would seem to annihilate the belief that secular and religious terrorist groups are incapable of collaboration. Why, it’s as outrageous as a right-wing American Republican president being in league with a left-wing British Labour prime minister! Their ideologies are completely incompatible.
According to the memo—which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points—Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in
some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.
Mmm! Yummy!
The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan’s assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization’s capabilities through ties with Iraq."
That would make General Bashir and Turabi the main drivers behind al-Qaeda hooking up with Iraq as well as Iran. Yet another reason to keep Sudan on the terrorist list.
It falls in with this, too, from mid-September...
The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front.
Turabi was released from durance vile in October...
Numerous sources have confirmed this. One defector reported that "al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-al Qaeda relationship. The defector said Iraq sought al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided al Qaeda with training and instructors."
Do "proscribed weapons" include nerve gas? We saw Abu Khabab and Co testing it out on dogs at Darunta camp. The UN bright boys say that it’s only a matter of time till al-Qaeda carries out a chem/bio attack and that may well be what El Shukrijumah and his boss Jdey were sent over to the States for. Interesting that we first started looking for them about the same time that Sammy’s 48 deadline expired, don’t ya think?
One such confirmation came in a postwar interview with one of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. As the memo details:
4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting—the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were . Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes.
Yet another benefit of having nearly collected the entire deck of cards. Hijazi is now in custody and the only Mukhabarat bad boy still at large is Habbush, IIRC.
A decisive moment in the budding relationship came in 1993, when bin Laden faced internal resistance to his cooperation with Saddam.
5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.
The Islamic Army was an early name for al-Qaeda, though Binny didn’t care much for it and so he stuck with the latter. The mention of differences over whether or not to align with Iraq among the al-Qaeda brass is interesting and could explain why both Zubaydah and Khalid said it never happened to begin with. May be yet another sign of the group’s decentralization that not all the leaders were aware of the full extent of the group’s allies. Or they could just be lying and in need of more giggle juice.
Another facilitator of the relationship during the mid-1990s was Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. Abu Hajer al-Iraqi). Abu Hajer, now in a New York prison, was described in court proceedings related to the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as bin Laden’s "best friend." According to CIA reporting dating back to the Clinton administration, bin Laden trusted him to serve as a liaison with Saddam’s regime and tasked him with procurement of weapons of mass destruction for al Qaeda. FBI reporting in the memo reveals that Abu Hajer "visited Iraq in early 1995" and "had a good relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Sometime before mid-1995 he went on an al Qaeda mission to discuss unspecified cooperation with the Iraqi government."
Salim got jugged after the Embassy bombings and stabbed a guard in the eye with a knife he made out of a comb. He was reportedly head of al-Qaeda’s WMD division, though I imagine that Abu Khabab has taken on that role these days. Makes sense that he would try to get technical help from the people with the most experience in that field.
Some of the reporting about the relationship throughout the mid-1990s comes from a source who had intimate knowledge of bin Laden and his dealings. This source, according to CIA analysis, offered "the most credible information" on cooperation between bin Laden and Iraq. This source’s reports read almost like a diary. Specific dates of when bin Laden flew to various cities are included, as well as names of individuals he met. The source did not offer information on the substantive talks during the meetings. . . . There are not a great many reports in general on the relationship between bin Laden and Iraq because of the secrecy surrounding it. But when this source with close access provided a "window" into bin Laden’s activities, bin Laden is seen as heavily involved with Iraq (and Iran).
Ties with the Black Hats isn’t going to be surprising anybody, given that Binny himself may well be hanging out at an IRGC military base with Junior these days if he’s still alive. Be interesting to know where else he was racking up frequent flyer miles, though.
Reporting from the early 1990s remains somewhat sketchy, though multiple sources place Hassan al-Turabi and Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s current No. 2, at the center of the relationship. The reporting gets much more specific in the mid-1990s:
8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS’s [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden’s farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.
That "farm" was also al-Qaeda HQ as long as the group was based in Sudan.
9 . . . Bin Laden visited Doha, Qatar (17-19 Jan. 1996), staying at the residence of a member of the Qatari ruling family. He discussed the successful movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia, and operations targeted against U.S. and U.K. interests in Dammam, Dharan, and Khobar, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, bin Laden met with Hijazi and Turabi, among others.
I’m guessing that the Qatari royal in question is our good buddy Abdul Karim al-Thani, who also hosted Zarqawi and Khalid on occasion and poured millions into al-Qaeda’s coffers. My guess would be that he’s another link in the Golden Chain.
And later more reporting, from the same "well placed" source:
10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden’s farm and discussed bin Laden’s request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence’s premier explosives maker—especially skilled in making car bombs—remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required.
Ali Mohammed said court testimony at the Embassy bombing trials that Binny decided to outsource explosives expertise after the first WTC bombing and that Turabi hooked him up with the Black Hats, Mugniyeh, and Hezbollah. From the looks of things, he didn’t stop there.
The analysis of those events follows:
The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation.
And they did a little outsourcing of their own to do it. That also means that the Saudi cover story was bunk, who’d of thought it?
IN ADDITION TO THE CONTACTS CLUSTERED in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad’s point of contact with al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz."
That fits with documents recovered by various newspapers from the old Mukhabarat HQ, including the UK Telegraph.
Since we have Tariq in hand, we've probably asked him about that...
11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan in 1999. . . .

14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.
I’m guessing that this Jund al-Shams or whatever the prototype for Ansar al-Islam was called. Another possibility would be that it’s Komala Islamiyyah, which hosted one of Ansar’s chemical weapons factories at Khurmal before the war and got hit with US cruise missiles on the first night of the bombing. Abdul Aziz sounds like a Saudi name, though I’m curious as to whether or not he was "Ghost," the name of the top terrorist trainer referenced by the two Iraqi defectors from Salman Pak in October 2001.
That visit came as the Iraqis intensified their defiance of the U.N. inspection regime, known as UNSCOM, created by the cease-fire agreement following the Gulf War. UNSCOM demanded access to Saddam’s presidential palaces that he refused to provide. As the tensions mounted, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon on February 18, 1998, and prepared the nation for war. He warned of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals" and said "there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."
And loathe as I am to admit it, he had a good point.
The day after this speech, according to documents unearthed in April 2003 in the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein’s intelligence service wrote a memo detailing coming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered by liquid paper that, when revealed, exposed a plan to increase cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to that memo, the IIS agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might provide "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."
Yep, it looks like Sammy wanted to be able to outsource al-Qaeda to hit back at the US without him actually having to do so, which fit with Binny’s goals just perfectly.
Four days later, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden issued his now-famous fatwa on the plight of Iraq, published in the Arabic-language daily, al Quds al-Arabi:
"For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples."
Bin Laden urged his followers to act: "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
This would be the formal creation of the International Islamic Front, IIRC correctly. CNN has the video up in the "Terror on Tape" section of their website.
Although war was temporarily averted by a last-minute deal brokered by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, tensions soon rose again. The standoff with Iraq came to a head in December 1998, when President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a 70-hour bombing campaign that began on December 16 and ended three days later, on December 19, 1998. According to press reports at the time, Faruq Hijazi, deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met with bin Laden in Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer bin Laden safe haven in Iraq. CIA reporting in the memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee seems to confirm this meeting and relates two others.
15. A foreign government service reported that an Iraqi delegation, including at least two Iraqi intelligence officers formerly assigned to the Iraqi Embassy in Pakistan, met in late 1998 with bin Laden in Afghanistan.

16. According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998.

17. . . . Iraq sent an intelligence officer to Afghanistan to seek closer ties to bin Laden and the Taliban in late 1998. The source reported that the Iraqi regime was trying to broaden its cooperation with al Qaeda. Iraq was looking to recruit Muslim "elements" to sabotage U.S. and U.K. interests. After a senior Iraqi intelligence officer met with Taliban leader [Mullah] Omar, arrangements were made for a series of meetings between the Iraqi intelligence officer and bin Laden in Pakistan. The source noted Faruq Hijazi was in Afghanistan in late 1998.

18. . . . Faruq Hijazi went to Afghanistan in 1999 along with several other Iraqi officials to meet with bin Laden. The source claimed that Hijazi would have met bin Laden only at Saddam’s explicit direction.
Hijazi’s little trek to Afghanistan is pretty much a matter of public record when it happened ... and was roundly ignored by the press during the run up to war.
An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports:
  • Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.

  • Information about connections between al Qaeda and Iraq was so widespread by early 1999 that it made its way into the mainstream press. A January 11, 1999, Newsweek story ran under this headline: "Saddam + Bin Laden?" The story cited an "Arab intelligence source" with knowledge of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. "According to this source, Saddam expected last month’s American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam’s long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift if formally."
The utter irresponsibility of the press here is what really gets me, given how many if not all of the same publications that wrote all of this stuff are now telling us that there was never any link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and that the very idea of a connection was "hyped up" by the administration to fool us dumb masses into accepting the war.
INTELLIGENCE REPORTS about the nature of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda from mid-1999 through 2003 are conflicting. One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, "said that the last contact between the IIS and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam’s office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda."
Then there is still the issue of Zarqawi in Baghdad, indicating that perhaps Sammy didn’t want to back off quite that much ...
The bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that "in late 1999" al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that "was operational as of 1999." Other reports suggest that the Iraqi regime contemplated several offers of safe haven to bin Laden throughout 1999.
The northern Iraq training camp was probably actually the proto-Ansar al-Islam (at Khurmal?), though this was indicate that they were up and running by 1999.
23. . . . Iraqi officials were carefully considering offering safe haven to bin Laden and his closest collaborators in Nov. 1999. The source indicated the idea was put forward by the presumed head of Iraqi intelligence in Islamabad (Khalid Janaby) who in turn was in frequent contact and had good relations with bin Laden.
Some of the most intriguing intelligence concerns an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir:
24. According to sensitive reporting, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national (Shakir) facilitated the arrival of one of the Sept 11 hijackers for an operational meeting in Kuala Lumpur (Jan 2000). Sensitive reporting indicates Shakir’s travel and contacts link him to a worldwide network of terrorists, including al Qaeda. Shakir worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport—a job he claimed to have obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee.
Now that is interesting. Where exactly is Shakir these days, anyway?
One of the men at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole.
Yet another one-legged al-Qaeda supremo ...
25. Investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 by al Qaeda revealed no specific Iraqi connections but according to the CIA, "fragmentary evidence points to possible Iraqi involvement."

26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was on the top 20 list pre-9/11 (back when Khalid was assumed to be just Oplan Bojinka small fry), so if this is him talking under interrogation it be at least as credible as Zubaydah and Khalid’s.
The analysis of this report follows. CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh’s timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons."
There’s a comforting thought. Did he get an answer?
Additional reporting also calls into question the claim that relations between Iraq and al Qaeda cooled after mid-1999:
27. According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia.
And then there is the alleged contact between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The reporting on those links suggests not one meeting, but as many as four. What’s more, the memo reveals potential financing of Atta’s activities by Iraqi intelligence.
The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, [Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir] al Ani, on several occasions.
Al-Ani's in custody, too. I wonder what he's got to say...
During one of these meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office.
And the commentary:
CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague—in Dec. 1994 and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two—on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001—is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information.
It’s not just Gross who stands by the information. Five high-ranking members of the Czech government have publicly confirmed meetings between Atta and al Ani. The meeting that has gotten the most press attention—April 9, 2001—is also the most widely disputed. Even some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met al Ani on that occasion. They believe that reports of the alleged meeting, said to have taken place in public, outside the headquarters of the U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, suggest a level of sloppiness that doesn’t fit the pattern of previous high-level Iraq-al Qaeda contacts. Whether or not that specific meeting occurred, the report by Czech counterintelligence that al Ani ordered the Iraqi Intelligence Service officer to provide IIS funds to Atta might help explain the lead hijacker’s determination to reach Prague, despite significant obstacles, in the spring of 2000. (Note that the report stops short of confirming that the funds were transferred. It claims only that the IIS officer requested the transfer.) Recall that Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but was denied entry because he did not have a valid visa. Rather than simply return to Germany and fly directly to the United States, his ultimate destination, Atta took pains to get to Prague. After he was refused entry the first time, he traveled back to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and caught a bus back to Prague. He left for the United States the day after arriving in Prague for the second time.
But still no telling whether the money was transferred...
Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:
31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel.
How many of those 90 or so operatives turned out to be "North Africans" who showed up in Europe for Zarqawi’s chemical weapons plots in late 2002 and early 2003? There’s an imminent threat if you want one, IMHO ...
That would be a hell of a time to be doing it, though — just at the time Bush was throwing down the glove at the UN — unless Sammy intended to open a second, proxy front.
The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration: References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11. Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell’s case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.
37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi’s procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.
We seem to be to dealing with the aftermath of that deal right now. That also jives with press reports of al-Qaeda fighting alongside the Fedayeen during the war.
38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.
Yeah, that did them a lot of good ...
The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."
That’s interesting, the highest sum I’d seen that the PUK reported from Iraq to Ansar was $35,000
CRITICS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION have complained that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror; that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely "exaggerated" for political purposes; that hawks "cherry-picked" bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public. Carl Levin, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made those points as recently as November 9, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." Republicans on the committee, he complained, refuse to look at the administration’s "exaggeration of intelligence." Said Levin: "The question is whether or not they exaggerated intelligence in order to carry out their purpose, which was to make the case for going to war. Did we know, for instance, with certainty that there was any relationship between the Iraqis and the terrorists that were in Afghanistan, bin Laden? The administration said that there’s a connection between those terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was there a basis for that?"
Seems like there was, doesn't it?
There was, as shown in the memo to the committee on which Levin serves. And much of the reporting comes from Clinton-era intelligence. Not that you would know this from Al Gore’s recent public statements. Indeed, the former vice president claims to be privy to new "evidence" that the administration lied. In an August speech at New York University, Gore claimed: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Really?
Oh, of course. All this mess, and all the corroboration in our links, that's just made up. Really. Never happened...
One of the most interesting things to note about the 16-page memo is that it covers only a fraction of the evidence that will eventually be available to document the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. For one thing, both Saddam and bin Laden were desperate to keep their cooperation secret. (Remember, Iraqi intelligence used liquid paper on an internal intelligence document to conceal bin Laden’s name.) For another, few people in the U.S. government are expressly looking for such links. There is no Iraq-al Qaeda equivalent of the CIA’s 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group currently searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. Instead, CIA and FBI officials are methodically reviewing Iraqi intelligence files that survived the three-week war last spring. These documents would cover several miles if laid end-to-end. And they are in Arabic. They include not only connections between bin Laden and Saddam, but also revolting details of the regime’s long history of brutality. It will be a slow process.
They'll also be showing links between Sammy's operation and other Bad Guy networks, with really long fingers reaching into the Paleo terror groups. There will also be other interesting links — wonder what the ties are to ISI, for instance, and who they owned in the Soddy heirarchy. We've already seem glimpses coming out about Kuwait.
So Feith’s memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee is best viewed as sort of a "Cliff’s Notes" version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive. One example. The memo contains only one paragraph on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi facilitator who escorted two September 11 hijackers through customs in Kuala Lumpur. U.S. intelligence agencies have extensive reporting on his activities before and after the September 11 hijacking. That they would include only this brief overview suggests the 16-page memo, extensive as it is, just skims the surface of the reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda connections. Other intelligence reports indicate that Shakir whisked not one but two September 11 hijackers—Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi—through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they met with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the masterminds of the September 11 plot. The meeting lasted three days. Shakir returned to work on January 9 and January 10, and never again. Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for its intelligence held in Pakistanoperations; in some cases, more than half of the alleged "diplomats" were intelligence operatives.) The Iraqi embassy, not his employer, controlled Shakir’s schedule. He was detained in Qatar on September 17, 2001. Authorities found in his possession contact information for terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and the September 11 hijackings. The CIA had previous reporting that Shakir had received a phone call from the safe house where the 1993 World Trade Center attacks had been plotted. The Qataris released Shakir shortly after his arrest.
That'd be Mr. Minister of Interior again...
On October 21, 2001, he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was to change planes to a flight to Baghdad. He didn’t make that flight. Shakir was detained in Jordan for three months, where the CIA interrogated him. His interrogators concluded that Shakir had received extensive training in counter-interrogation techniques. Not long after he was detained, according to an official familiar with the intelligence, the Iraqi regime began to "pressure" Jordanian intelligence to release him. At the same time, Amnesty International complained that Shakir was being held without charge. The Jordanians released him on January 28, 2002, at which point he is believed to have fled back to Iraq. Was Shakir an Iraqi agent? Does he provide a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11? We don’t know. We may someday find out. But there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.
That pretty much sums up the whole article in a nutshell.
Link


Middle East
Indictment reveals operations of Jund al-Shams network
2003-07-03
Thomas Foley, executive officer of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Jordan, was shot dead last year outside his home in a western Amman neighbourhood. The 60-year-old diplomat was about to enter his car when he was hit by a volley of bullets fired from close range. Soon after, Jordan and the USA charged Al-Qaeda with responsibility for the attack. In an audio recording released several weeks later, believed to be by Osama Bin Laden, the speaker mentioned Foley's murder among a list of other attacks committed by Al-Qaeda.
Yeah. You might consider that grounds for tying the killing to Al-Qaeda. So what's the problem?
However, the indictment specifies Al-Zarqawi, as the key figure behind the attack. Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian national, together with 10 other defendants — Libyans, Syrians and another Jordanian — are charged with the murder of Foley and with plotting to commit other attacks against US and Israeli targets in Jordan. Only five of the 11 suspects are in custody, among them Saad Salem Bin-Suawayed, a 40-year-old Libyan, suspected to have been the gunman.
Still not sure I see a problem...
According to the indictment, Al-Zarqawi visited Syria last year, where he met the operatives involved in the plot. They were trained in Syria, supplied with guns and grenades, and then returned to Jordan with instructions to locate a suitable target. Suawayed and his accomplices began searching the diplomatic neighbourhood of Amman for possible targets. By chance, they spotted Foley's diplomatic licensed car and followed it until he arrived at his home. The team waited outside the house until Foley emerged again and then shot him. The indictment does not attribute the attack to Al-Qaeda, and regional intelligence sources have pointed the finger at Al-Zarqawi's own independent faction, Jund al-Shams. "The Jordanians are experts when it comes to Al-Qaeda," a senior intelligence source told JTIC. "If they say it's not Al-Qaeda -then it isn't."
So Zarqawi is the emir of Jund al-Shams, and also of al-Tawhid, so are these different names for the same organisation, or are they independant of each other, with Al-Zarqawi as the glue that holds these and other small Jihadi groups in the region together?
In recent months, Israeli intelligence agencies have ceased the use of the term `Al-Qaeda' and began referring to what they call `World Jihad' - "a series of dozens of small affiliated organisations that operate in different levels of co-operation", according to a senior intelligence source who spoke to JTIC. "Al-Zarqawi embodies the complexity of this matrix," the source added.
One only has to look at Thugburg to get a hint at the dozens of affiliated groups in the global Jihad, and for every one listed, there are probably at least a couple more still waiting to be noticed by the international media. I mean Pakistan alone has dozens of groups, and Indonesia probably has nearly as many. But they all want to see the Khalifate back, so they can get that permanant Jihad thing going until Dar-ul Harb becomes Dar ul Islam
They might consider calling it, ummm... the "World Islamic Front," in fact. That's what Binny called it in his declaration of war on us. I was under the impression Jund al-Shams was a false nose and moustache for Jund al-Islam, which was a separate group from Tawhid, but I could be wrong. It could be that when the same bunch meets on Mondays they're al-Islam, on Wednesdays they're al-Shams, and on Fridays they're Tawhid. (Tuesdays they're Ansar al-Islam, and Thursdays they go bowling.) Confuses the hell out of the poor analyst, especially when you add in the fact that some of them are also Ikhwanis and some are Hizb ut-Tahrir and some are adherents of Takfir wal-Hijra, and some are all of them at the same time...

I sometimes think there are a total of 150 Bad Guys in the entire world, all of them inbred related, grouped together in 115,765 different organizations. Each Bad Guy changes his name and his organization more frequently than he changes his underwear.
Link


Iran
Zarqawi in Iran?
2003-06-10
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A top al Qaeda associate in Iraq has fled to neighboring Iran, where he and several senior al-Qaeda leaders apparently remain under the protection of the Iranian government, U.S. intelligence officials say. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled Iraq within the past several weeks and is in Iran, the officials told The Washington Times. Al-Zarqawi was identified in a U.N. briefing given in February by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as an "associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants." That link was a key element in the U.S. case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was tied to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, a stance repeated yesterday by President Bush in response to a New York Times report that said two al Qaeda captives had said the group did not cooperate with Saddam.
But Ansar al-Islam did, forming a second front against the Kurds. Abu Zubaydah, one of the two Qaeda Bigs claiming there was no cooperation, was Ansar's controller...
"I guess the people that wrote that article forgot about al-Zarqawi's network inside of Baghdad that ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen named [Laurence] Foley," Mr. Bush said. "And history in time will prove that the United States made the absolute right decision in freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." U.S. intelligence officials believe that al-Zarqawi helped the terrorists who killed Mr. Foley, a U.S. diplomat, in Amman, Jordan, in October.
Because Ansar was once-removed from al-Qaeda, and Zarqawi's organizations were sub-cells of Ansar, there's a bit of arguing space available for the Times and the Guardian. Not an awful lot, if you've been paying attention, but most people haven't...
Iran's government have denied Bush administration assertions that Tehran was harboring al Qaeda terrorists. But the Iranian government has recently stated that it had detained several al Qaeda members, although it has not identified any. American intelligence officials said Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and the Qods Division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a unit of hard-line Islamist shock troops, are deeply involved in supporting terrorists, including al Qaeda. A U.S. official said the Bush administration wants Iran to turn over al-Zarqawi to the United States because of his connection to the Foley killing. The U.S. official said any approach is likely to be carried out through a friendly third party, such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia.
Iran would lose Islamic "face" by turning them over, even through a third party. They could possibly end up with the Soddies, but even that's not too likely. Too many eyes watching now, too much chance of somebody among the princes taking the antiterror line too seriously. That would mean Zarqawi would go to Jordan, where they have a noose with his name on it, even without delving into the Foley murder.
The official said al-Zarqawi is not a member of al Qaeda but "worked with them when it was convenient."
More like an affiliate, the same way Egyptian Islamic Jihad's an affiliate. Qaeda, remember, is made up of autonomous groups working toward the same end.
"He's a real bad actor," said the official, who cautioned that al-Zarqawi's presence in Iran is not a certainty. "There are reports he's washed up in Iran." Another intelligence official said al-Zarqawi might be among the al Qaeda members that the government of Iran said it had detained, although other officials doubted this. Other officials said recent intelligence reports circulated within the U.S. government stated that al-Zarqawi moved to Iran from Iraq after Mr. Powell identified him in the Feb. 5 briefing to the Security Council.
I'd guess there's a safe haven they had set up in the Iranian side of the border, where it'd be just about as easy to dislodge them as it was for the Kurds to dislodge Ansar, which wasn't very. After their Kurdish haven was clobbered, there were reports that the Ansar gunnies were turned back from the border when they tried to beat it. They were headed someplace at the time, and I doubt if it was just "east."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last month that he is convinced that senior al Qaeda leaders are in Iran. Asked whether the United States would go to war with Iran if Tehran is sheltering al Qaeda, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "Well, those are decisions not for me. Those are decisions for the president."
And not for public consumption yet...
"It is worrisome that that country clearly is not being helpful in Iraq today," Mr. Rumsfeld said on May 29. "It is also clear that they have permitted senior al Qaeda to operate in their country, and that is something that creates a danger to the world, because we know what the al Qaeda can do in terms of killing innocent men, women and children." Defense and intelligence officials said the senior al Qaeda members the secretary has mentioned include at least two hiding in Iran — including Saif al-Adel, who is believed to be the official in charge of al Qaeda's military operations and has been linked to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Al-Adel has been in Iran since 2002 and is on the FBI's list of most-wanted international terrorists. A second top al Qaeda leader in Iran is Osama bin Laden's oldest son, Saad bin Laden, who also arrived in Iran in 2002. Many U.S. intelligence analysts say they believe he took over al Qaeda's leadership after the U.S. military's destruction of al Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan in October 2001.
My guess is that Saad is running a part of the family business, assuming Binny himself isn't dead. Because of its structure, Qaeda's broken into chunks, each of which will have to be broken up individually...
Al-Zarqawi is the leader of the Islamist terror group Jund al-Shams, which is linked to al Qaeda and has operated in Syria and Jordan.
Jund al-Shams is an alias of Jund al-Islam, which was one of the components of Ansar al-Islam. It was formed by Zarqawi's al-Tawhid mob merging with some breakaway nut groups from Islamic Unity Movement in Kurdistan. Tawhid retained its autonomy, though, keeping its emphasis on the Levant and Europe, while the Kurdish yokels contented themselves with tormenting their immediate neighbords.
After U.S. forces disrupted al Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi fled that country and ended up with the Ansar al-Islam, which operated a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. The camp was bombed by U.S. warplanes and attacked on the ground by Special Forces troops during the Iraq war. Mr. Powell said in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council that the Ansar al-Islam camp was run by al-Zarqawi agents. He said the camp was operated with the help of a top Iraqi agent "in the most senior levels of the radical organization."
Link



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