Iran helped 9/11, using the Saudis as proxies. Look at the facts. - US Treasury agrees
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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APRIL 2016!I'm going to be vindicated so hard
Just wait...you laugh now
@88m3 tell these boys my record...ask about Ukraineask about Russia
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
Schindler has been trying to tell us for a decade
ill
Superstar
This needs a fukking movie
Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Accused in U.S. Embassy Attacks, Was Killed in Iran
Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Accused in U.S. Embassy Attacks, Was Killed in Iran
Israeli agents shot Abu Muhammad al-Masri on the streets of Tehran at the behest of the U.S., officials said, but no one — Iran, Al Qaeda, the U.S. or Israel — has publicly acknowledged the killing.
By Adam Goldman, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman
Published Nov. 13, 2020Updated Nov. 14, 2020, 5:16 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader, accused of being one of the masterminds of the deadly 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, was killed in Iran three months ago, intelligence officials have confirmed.
Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was gunned down on the streets of Tehran by two assassins on a motorcycle on Aug. 7, the anniversary of the embassy attacks. He was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin Laden.
The attack was carried out by Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States, according to four of the officials. It is unclear what role if any was played by the United States, which had been tracking the movements of Mr. al-Masri and other Qaeda operatives in Iran for years.
The killing occurred in such a netherworld of geopolitical intrigue and counterterrorism spycraft that Mr. al-Masri’s death had been rumored but never confirmed until now. For reasons that are still obscure, Al Qaeda has not announced the death of one of its top leaders, Iranian officials covered it up, and no country has publicly claimed responsibility for it.
Mr. al-Masri, who was about 58, was one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders and was thought to be first in line to lead the organization after its current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.
Long featured on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, he had been indicted in the United States for crimes related to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded hundreds. The F.B.I. offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture, and as of Friday, his picture was still on the Most Wanted list.
The F.B.I. wanted poster for Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri.Federal Bureau of Investigation
That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and Al Qaeda are bitter enemies. Iran, a Shiite Muslim theocracy, and Al Qaeda, a Sunni Muslim jihadist group, have fought each other on the battlefields of Iraq and other places.
American intelligence officials say that Mr. al-Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003, but that he had been living freely in the Pasdaran district of Tehran, an upscale suburb, since at least 2015.
Around 9:00 on a warm summer night, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle drew up beside him. Five shots were fired from a pistol fitted with a silencer. Four bullets entered the car through the driver’s side and a fifth hit a nearby car.
As news of the shooting broke, Iran’s official news media identified the victims as Habib Daoud, a Lebanese history professor, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese news channel MTV and social media accounts affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps reported that Mr. Daoud was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant organization in Lebanon.
It seemed plausible.
The killing came amid a summer of frequent explosions in Iran, mounting tensions with the United States, days after an enormous explosion in the port of Beirut and a week before the United Nations Security Council was to consider extending an arms embargo against Iran. There was speculation that the killing may have been a Western provocation intended to elicit a violent Iranian reaction in advance of the Security Council vote.
And the targeted killing by two gunmen on a motorcycle fit the modus operandi of previous Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. That Israel would kill an official of Hezbollah, which is committed to fighting Israel, also seemed to make sense, except for the fact that Israel had been consciously avoiding killing Hezbollah operatives so as not to provoke a war.
In fact, there was no Habib Daoud.
Several Lebanese with close ties to Iran said they had not heard of him or his killing. A search of Lebanese news media found no reports of a Lebanese history professor killed in Iran last summer. And an education researcher with access to lists of all history professors in the country said there was no record of a Habib Daoud.
One of the intelligence officials said that Habib Daoud was an alias Iranian officials gave Mr. al-Masri and the history teaching job was a cover story. In October, the former leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Nabil Naeem, who called Mr. al-Masri a longtime friend, told the Saudi news channel Al Arabiya the same thing.
Iran may have had good reason for wanting to hide the fact that it was harboring an avowed enemy, but it was less clear why Iranian officials would have taken in the Qaeda leader to begin with.
Some terrorism experts suggested that keeping Qaeda officials in Tehran might provide some insurance that the group would not conduct operations inside Iran. American counterterrorism officials believe Iran may have allowed them to stay to run operations against the United States, a common adversary.
It would not be the first time that Iran had joined forces with Sunni militants, having supported Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Taliban.
“Iran uses sectarianism as a cudgel when it suits the regime, but is also willing to overlook the Sunni-Shia divide when it suits Iranian interests,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Center.
Iran has consistently denied housing the Qaeda officials. In 2018, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said that because of Iran’s long, porous border with Afghanistan, some Qaeda members had entered Iran, but they had been detained and returned to their home countries.
However, Western intelligence officials said the Qaeda leaders had been kept under house arrest by the Iranian government, which then made at least two deals with Al Qaeda to free some of them in 2011 and 2015.
Although Al Qaeda has been overshadowed in recent years by the rise of the Islamic State, it remains resilient and has active affiliates around the globe, a U.N. counterterrorism report issued in July concluded.
Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Spokesmen for the Israeli prime minister’s office and the Trump administration’s National Security Council declined to comment.
Mr. al-Masri was a longtime member of Al Qaeda’s highly secretive management council, along with Saif al-Adl, who was also held in Iran at one point. The pair, along with Hamza bin Laden, who was being groomed to take over the organization, were part of a group of senior Qaeda leaders who sought refuge in Iran after the 9/11 attacks on the United States forced them to flee Afghanistan.
According to a highly classified document produced by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center in 2008, Mr. al-Masri was the “most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.” The document described him as the “former chief of training” who “worked closely” with Mr. al-Adl.
In Iran, Mr. al-Masri mentored Hamza bin Laden, according to terrorism experts. Hamza bin Laden later married Mr. al-Masri’s daughter, Miriam.
gonna repost this article every time a dumb dumb says Israel doesn’t do anything for us.
I’d say assassinating an AQ leader in Iran and preventing us from going to war with Iran might be a benefit to america.
Al-Qaeda leader’s death in Tehran shines spotlight on terrorist ties
Al-Qaeda leader’s death in Tehran shines spotlight on terrorist ties
Al Arabiya English Saturday 14 November 2020
Text size A A A
Reports that Al Qaeda’s second-in-command was assassinated in Tehran over the summer have refocused attention on relations between the international terrorist organization and Iran’s government.
On Friday, the New York Times cited anonymous US intelligence officials to report that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, known as Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was assassinated on the streets of Tehran on August 7.
For all the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.
Al-Masri was one of al-Qaeda’s founders and the mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed over 200 people and wounded hundreds more.
According to the Times citing four unnamed intelligence officials, al-Masri was shot and killed by two “Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States.” The report is in line with an Al Arabiya interview with Nabil Naeem, the former leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, who said last month that al-Masri had been using a cover name.
Read more: ‘Lebanese man’ killed in Iran over the summer was al-Qaeda deputy leader: NYT
Al-Masri’s daughter Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, was also killed in the same attack, said the report.
At the time of the shooting, official Iranian media said that the victims were “Habib Daoud,” a Lebanese history professor, and his daughter Miriam. The Lebanese news channel MTV identified Daoud as a member of the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization, whose members have often been seen in Tehran.
Iran denied the reports on Friday, claiming that it has no links with al-Qaeda.
However, analysts have pointed out that despite religious differences, the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran and Sunni al-Qaeda have had long-term relations, with Tehran harboring various al-Qaeda senior figures responsible for atrocities across the world.
“Iran and al-Qaeda have always flirted. Iran has historically helped both the Taliban and the Taliban’s Shia enemies in Afghanistan,” Danielle Pletka, Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, told Al Arabiya English.
Early links between Tehran and al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda was founded in 1988 by Salafist militants Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Azzam and other volunteers who were fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Under bin Laden, the organization sought to wage a global war against the US and its allies.
The US government’s 9/11 Commission – established after Bin Laden masterminded the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US that killed almost 3,000 people – found that relations between Iran and al-Qaeda were established as early as 1991 in Sudan.
According to the commission, Sudan hosted meetings between al-Qaeda leaders and Iranian officials, as well as personnel from the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
Bin Laden reportedly then met with Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander, who was also an officer of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Under Mughniyeh, the IRGC trained al-Qaeda militants in Lebanon, said the commission.
In 1996, truck bombing attacks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 US personnel and injured almost 500 others of various nationalities. The US has blamed Iran and the Hezbollah al-Hijaz organization, and Bin Laden welcomed the bombing. The 9/11 Commission said, “we have seen strong but indirect evidence that his organization did, in fact, play some as yet unknown role in the Khobar attack.”
Both Tehran and al-Qaeda were also implicated in the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
According to witnesses cited in The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)’s The Long War Journal, al-Qaeda attackers had received training from the Iran-backed Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah provided explosives training for al-Qaeda and al-Jihad. Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hezbollah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks,” the FDD quoted Ali Mohamed, one of the militants involved in the bombings, as saying in his plea deal.
Iran also helped facilitate al-Qaeda members’ movements.
Before 2001, Iran allowed al-Qaeda members to pass through its borders without stamping their passports or with visas from its consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, revealed a 19-page report found among Bin Laden’s items in the US raid on his Abbottabad compound in which he was killed.
Iran offered al-Qaeda “money and arms and everything they needed, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia,” the report said, as quoted by The Associated Press.
IRGC welcomes Al-Qaeda leaders in Tehran
Iran has hosted various al-Qaeda leaders, including senior figures responsible for terror attacks across the region.
“Al-Qaeda serves Iran’s interests, and they manipulate the relationship to their advantage,” Pletka said.
Many al-Qaeda militants fled from Afghanistan to Iran following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, launched in part to destroy al-Qaeda’s base there following the September 11 attacks.
“Al Qaeda’s Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after US forces invaded Afghanistan,” wrote former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke in his book “Against All Enemies.”
While Bin Laden and some others retreated to cave hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistan border, several of al-Qaeda’s top leaders relocated to Iran between 2001 and 2003.
In 2001, Mahfouz ibn al-Waleed, the Mauritanian head of al-Qaeda’s sharia committee who was wanted by the FBI for his role in the 1998 US embassy bombings, fled to the Iranian border under disguise.
According to The Atlantic, Iran’s IRGC welcomed al-Waleed and granted him an audience with its chief, General Qassem Soleimani.
The IRGC allowed al-Waleed to contact other al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan and invite them to come over to Iran, giving them false travel documents on entry, and discussed their presence with the US, according to a report by The Atlantic that drew upon interviews with al-Qaeda members.
The following year, senior al-Qaeda leaders Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Saif al-Adel, and Abu Musab al-Suri – as well as al-Masri – all arrived in Iran. Alongside them also came Bin Laden’s own family.
“The IRGC is nominally the ‘supervising’ power of al-Qaeda figures inside Iran. It should be assumed they have substantial information about everything that al-Qaeda figures are doing,” Pletka said.
Hamza bin Laden
Hamza was Osama’s 11th son and was widely seen as his potential successor until US President Donald Trump announced that he was killed last year.
Along with other Bin Laden family members, Hamza arrived in Iran in mid-2002 and initially settled in a fortified farmhouse before being moved by the IRGC to a heavily guarded training center in northern Tehran, reported The Atlantic.
He lived in Iran until March 2010, where he was reportedly under house arrest, although video footage surfaced that showed his wedding in Tehran.
Iran released the Bin Laden’s from house arrest in 2010 after al-Qaeda kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Pakistan, after which it is thought that Hamza went to Pakistan.
Documents recovered from the Abbottabad raid revealed letter correspondence between Hamza and his father, who had sought a reunion with his son.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
The Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (real name Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah) was also able to travel to and from Iran.
Zarqawi fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he founded a training camp that hosted up to 3,000 fighters and their family members.
He was reportedly in Iran at the time of the September 11 attacks and returned to Afghanistan after the US invasion of the country.
A man burns a portrait of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, left, and Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Jan. 3, 2010. (AP)
However, he suffered a disputed injury and fled back to Iran, where he was given medical treatment in Iran’s Mashhad.
Iranian authorities reportedly refused the Jordanian government’s requests to extradite Zarqawi, despite him being a wanted man.
He subsequently was allowed to leave to neighboring Iraq, where he quickly established a reputation for brutality, earning the nickname “Sheikh of the slaughterers.”
Zarqawi has often been attributed with the creation of ISIS, as he founded its predecessor, the Islamic State of Iraq, in 2006. He was killed in the same year but left behind a legacy of violence in Iraq and beyond.
Saif al-Adel
The Egyptian al-Adel is one of al-Qaeda’s top military trainers. He entered Iran in 2002, where he was then put under house arrest.
Along with Osama’s son, Saad, al-Adel reportedly ordered an al-Qaeda cell to carry out the 2003 Riyadh compound bombings that killed 39 people and injured 160 at residential compounds in the Saudi capital.
The Jadawel compound, one of the compounds that was attacked in coordinated terrorist strikes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 17, 2003. (AP)
He reportedly served as al-Qaeda’s interim head after Bin Laden was killed in 2011.
In 2018, the United Nations reported that al-Adel and al-Masri were operating out of Iran, where they had the freedom to make managerial decisions for al-Qaeda.
According to the report, Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri had, “partly through the agency of senior al-Qaeda leadership figures based in the Islamic Republic of Iran … been able to exert influence on the situation in northwestern Syrian Arab Republic.”
The UN added that al-Adel had “influenced events in the Syrian Arab Republic ... causing formations, breakaways and mergers of various Al Qaeda-aligned groups in Idlib.”
His current whereabouts are unknown, and the US State Department has issued a $10 million reward for information about him.
Al-Qaeda leader’s death in Tehran shines spotlight on terrorist ties
Al Arabiya English Saturday 14 November 2020
Text size A A A
Reports that Al Qaeda’s second-in-command was assassinated in Tehran over the summer have refocused attention on relations between the international terrorist organization and Iran’s government.
On Friday, the New York Times cited anonymous US intelligence officials to report that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, known as Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was assassinated on the streets of Tehran on August 7.
For all the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.
Al-Masri was one of al-Qaeda’s founders and the mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed over 200 people and wounded hundreds more.
According to the Times citing four unnamed intelligence officials, al-Masri was shot and killed by two “Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States.” The report is in line with an Al Arabiya interview with Nabil Naeem, the former leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, who said last month that al-Masri had been using a cover name.
Read more: ‘Lebanese man’ killed in Iran over the summer was al-Qaeda deputy leader: NYT
Al-Masri’s daughter Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, was also killed in the same attack, said the report.
At the time of the shooting, official Iranian media said that the victims were “Habib Daoud,” a Lebanese history professor, and his daughter Miriam. The Lebanese news channel MTV identified Daoud as a member of the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization, whose members have often been seen in Tehran.
Iran denied the reports on Friday, claiming that it has no links with al-Qaeda.
However, analysts have pointed out that despite religious differences, the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran and Sunni al-Qaeda have had long-term relations, with Tehran harboring various al-Qaeda senior figures responsible for atrocities across the world.
“Iran and al-Qaeda have always flirted. Iran has historically helped both the Taliban and the Taliban’s Shia enemies in Afghanistan,” Danielle Pletka, Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, told Al Arabiya English.
Early links between Tehran and al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda was founded in 1988 by Salafist militants Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Azzam and other volunteers who were fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Under bin Laden, the organization sought to wage a global war against the US and its allies.
The US government’s 9/11 Commission – established after Bin Laden masterminded the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US that killed almost 3,000 people – found that relations between Iran and al-Qaeda were established as early as 1991 in Sudan.
According to the commission, Sudan hosted meetings between al-Qaeda leaders and Iranian officials, as well as personnel from the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
Bin Laden reportedly then met with Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander, who was also an officer of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Under Mughniyeh, the IRGC trained al-Qaeda militants in Lebanon, said the commission.
In 1996, truck bombing attacks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 US personnel and injured almost 500 others of various nationalities. The US has blamed Iran and the Hezbollah al-Hijaz organization, and Bin Laden welcomed the bombing. The 9/11 Commission said, “we have seen strong but indirect evidence that his organization did, in fact, play some as yet unknown role in the Khobar attack.”
Both Tehran and al-Qaeda were also implicated in the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
According to witnesses cited in The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)’s The Long War Journal, al-Qaeda attackers had received training from the Iran-backed Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah provided explosives training for al-Qaeda and al-Jihad. Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hezbollah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks,” the FDD quoted Ali Mohamed, one of the militants involved in the bombings, as saying in his plea deal.
Iran also helped facilitate al-Qaeda members’ movements.
Before 2001, Iran allowed al-Qaeda members to pass through its borders without stamping their passports or with visas from its consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, revealed a 19-page report found among Bin Laden’s items in the US raid on his Abbottabad compound in which he was killed.
Iran offered al-Qaeda “money and arms and everything they needed, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia,” the report said, as quoted by The Associated Press.
IRGC welcomes Al-Qaeda leaders in Tehran
Iran has hosted various al-Qaeda leaders, including senior figures responsible for terror attacks across the region.
“Al-Qaeda serves Iran’s interests, and they manipulate the relationship to their advantage,” Pletka said.
Many al-Qaeda militants fled from Afghanistan to Iran following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, launched in part to destroy al-Qaeda’s base there following the September 11 attacks.
“Al Qaeda’s Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after US forces invaded Afghanistan,” wrote former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke in his book “Against All Enemies.”
While Bin Laden and some others retreated to cave hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistan border, several of al-Qaeda’s top leaders relocated to Iran between 2001 and 2003.
In 2001, Mahfouz ibn al-Waleed, the Mauritanian head of al-Qaeda’s sharia committee who was wanted by the FBI for his role in the 1998 US embassy bombings, fled to the Iranian border under disguise.
According to The Atlantic, Iran’s IRGC welcomed al-Waleed and granted him an audience with its chief, General Qassem Soleimani.
The IRGC allowed al-Waleed to contact other al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan and invite them to come over to Iran, giving them false travel documents on entry, and discussed their presence with the US, according to a report by The Atlantic that drew upon interviews with al-Qaeda members.
The following year, senior al-Qaeda leaders Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Saif al-Adel, and Abu Musab al-Suri – as well as al-Masri – all arrived in Iran. Alongside them also came Bin Laden’s own family.
“The IRGC is nominally the ‘supervising’ power of al-Qaeda figures inside Iran. It should be assumed they have substantial information about everything that al-Qaeda figures are doing,” Pletka said.
Hamza bin Laden
Hamza was Osama’s 11th son and was widely seen as his potential successor until US President Donald Trump announced that he was killed last year.
Along with other Bin Laden family members, Hamza arrived in Iran in mid-2002 and initially settled in a fortified farmhouse before being moved by the IRGC to a heavily guarded training center in northern Tehran, reported The Atlantic.
He lived in Iran until March 2010, where he was reportedly under house arrest, although video footage surfaced that showed his wedding in Tehran.
Iran released the Bin Laden’s from house arrest in 2010 after al-Qaeda kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Pakistan, after which it is thought that Hamza went to Pakistan.
Documents recovered from the Abbottabad raid revealed letter correspondence between Hamza and his father, who had sought a reunion with his son.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
The Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (real name Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah) was also able to travel to and from Iran.
Zarqawi fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where he founded a training camp that hosted up to 3,000 fighters and their family members.
He was reportedly in Iran at the time of the September 11 attacks and returned to Afghanistan after the US invasion of the country.
A man burns a portrait of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, left, and Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Jan. 3, 2010. (AP)
However, he suffered a disputed injury and fled back to Iran, where he was given medical treatment in Iran’s Mashhad.
Iranian authorities reportedly refused the Jordanian government’s requests to extradite Zarqawi, despite him being a wanted man.
He subsequently was allowed to leave to neighboring Iraq, where he quickly established a reputation for brutality, earning the nickname “Sheikh of the slaughterers.”
Zarqawi has often been attributed with the creation of ISIS, as he founded its predecessor, the Islamic State of Iraq, in 2006. He was killed in the same year but left behind a legacy of violence in Iraq and beyond.
Saif al-Adel
The Egyptian al-Adel is one of al-Qaeda’s top military trainers. He entered Iran in 2002, where he was then put under house arrest.
Along with Osama’s son, Saad, al-Adel reportedly ordered an al-Qaeda cell to carry out the 2003 Riyadh compound bombings that killed 39 people and injured 160 at residential compounds in the Saudi capital.
The Jadawel compound, one of the compounds that was attacked in coordinated terrorist strikes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 17, 2003. (AP)
He reportedly served as al-Qaeda’s interim head after Bin Laden was killed in 2011.
In 2018, the United Nations reported that al-Adel and al-Masri were operating out of Iran, where they had the freedom to make managerial decisions for al-Qaeda.
According to the report, Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri had, “partly through the agency of senior al-Qaeda leadership figures based in the Islamic Republic of Iran … been able to exert influence on the situation in northwestern Syrian Arab Republic.”
The UN added that al-Adel had “influenced events in the Syrian Arab Republic ... causing formations, breakaways and mergers of various Al Qaeda-aligned groups in Idlib.”
His current whereabouts are unknown, and the US State Department has issued a $10 million reward for information about him.
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground - IGTDS
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground
The evidence proves Iran’s alliance and friendship with Al-Qaeda. Iran has long pursued ties to Sunni jihadists, including members of Al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission reports that in 1991 or 1992 Al–Qaeda and Iran had contacts in Sudan and that individuals linked to Al–Qaeda received training in Iran and Lebanon in the early 1990s. According to the FBI, between 1992 and 1996, several Al-Qaeda officials met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum in order to arrange a “tripartite agreement between Al-Qaeda, the National Islamic Front of Sudan, and elements of the Government of Iran”. The Iranian security services and MOIS [ Ministry of Information and Security] supported a number of terrorist camps during the period Al-Qaeda was based in Khartoum.
The 9/11 Commission found that senior Al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives in other cases. Senior Al-Qaeda operatives graduated from these training courses in Iran, according to the testimony of Al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania who was sent by bin Laden in 1995 to Iran met Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani to discuss advanced military training, with Al-Qaeda fighters. Mahfouz was also invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The results of this audience are unknown.
After 1996, when Al-Qaeda moved its headquarters and training camps to Afghanistan, links with Iran became weaker.
However, the 9/11 Commission said, the Intelligence indicated the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin’s return to Afghanistan.
Several of the 9/11 hijackers transited Iran, taking advantage of its policy of not stamping the passports of those traveling from Afghanistan—a practice that hindered Saudi security agencies’ ability to detect the terrorists when they later returned to the Kingdom.
Since 9/11, Iran has cooperated fitfully with the United States in fighting various Sunni jihadists. At times Iran has provided considerable cooperation, such as sending many jihadists back to their home countries, where pro-U.S. security services can question them.
Tehran, however, has allowed several very senior Al–Qaeda figures, such as Saif al-Adel, Saad bin Ladin, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, to remain in Iran.
According to the intelligence, Saif Al-Adel has been living in the eastern border regions of Iran under the protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, an elite military force under the direct control of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Although Iran supposedly monitors individuals linked to Al-Qaeda, some reports indicate they played a major role in the May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia—suggesting Iran is not exercising true control over them.
From left to right: Yasin al Suri, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, Sanafi al Nasr, Muhsin al Fadhli and Adel Radi al Harbi. Only Yasin al Suri is believed to be alive, but still others continue to operate in Iran.
On November 28, 2011 a U.S. District court issued a little-noticed ruling that effectively links Iran to Al-Qaeda on terrorism. In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to Al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa.
On February 16, 2012, the Treasury Department designated the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) for its support of Al-Qaeda, as well as other terrorist organizations. According to Treasury, “MOIS has facilitated the movement of Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports. MOIS also provided money and weapons to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)… and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.”
Iran appears to be keeping its options open with regard to the jihadists. On the one hand, it recognizes the heavy price to be paid if it openly backs them. Sectarian violence is a growing problem in Iraq. On the other hand, the jihadists are a potent weapon for Iran, which historically has tried to keep as many options open as possible.
This formerly clandestine network is the result of a specific “agreement” between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
Evidences
A former spokesman for the IRGC, Said Qasemi, shared a surprising revelation when he stated that the Iranian government sent agents to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train Al-Qaeda members under the cover of humanitarian workers for Iran’s Red Crescent.
Another Iranian official, Hossein Allahkaram, who is believed to be one of the operatives sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina, confirmed this, saying: “There used to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina … They were connected to us in a number of ways. Even though they were training within their own base, when they engaged in weapons training they joined us in various activities.”
Al-Qaeda members traveled to Lebanon. According to the documents, Iran provided them with “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”
The IRGC, its elite Quds Force and the Intelligence Ministry are likely three Iranian institutions have long been instrumental in helping Al-Qaeda.
According to a report in The New York Times published on November 14, 2020, which cited information from intelligence officials, the Al-Qaeda’s deputy commander in Tehran al-Masri (Saleh, Abu Mariam, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Ali, Abu Mohammed) was killed in the Pasdaran area (the same area that is the residence of Saif Al-Adel) of Tehran on Aug. 7, 2020. This has again raised questions about the Iranian regime’s relationship with the terrorist organization and has provided a fresh reminder of the need to analyze the regime’s strategy based on using the organization as an asset and providing safe havens for its leaders.
Al Masri, was seen as a likely successor to Al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was involved in the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports of Al-Masri’s killing on Iranian soil, describing them as “fake news.” Al-Qaeda has also not announced his death.
However according to the Iranian police data and Iranian state media there was a killing, in Tehran on Aug. 7. They reported about a Lebanese man and his daughter who had been killed in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Pasdaran by unknown assailants on motorcycle. They identified the man as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old history teacher, and his daughter Mariam, 27. Al-Masri must be in his 50s, as his date of birth considered to be 1968, corresponds to Dawoud’s age.
This data gives a reason to think that al-Masri was killed along with his daughter, Maryam Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah.
The theocratic Iranian establishment most likely provided Al-Masri with the resources to carry out his campaigns against the US and Gulf states.
Maryam was the widow of former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s son (Hamza bin Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden). So names of al-Masri’s daughter and woman who was killed in Tehran are the same. This increases the likelihood of the al-Masri killing version in Tehran.
The CIA released video shows Hamza bin Laden’s wedding, providing the first publicly-available images of him as a young man. The video was found in the materials seized during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011: images, and computer files. The wedding took place in Iran, where Hamza was held in a form of house arrest or imprisonment on and off for several years. Along with other members of the bin Laden family, Hamza relocated to Iran after the 9/11 hijackings supposedly in mid-2002.
Many members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups found they had no choice but to escape to Iran, particularly in light of the Iranian regime sharing the organization’s animosity toward the US and feeling they had no hope of fleeing to Pakistan given the strong CIA presence there.
Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003 but had been living freely in an upscale suburb of Tehran since 2015.
Many Al-Qaeda figures were welcomed inside the country. But ultimately their stay on Iranian soil became a highly contentious issue.
Supposedly in the beginning of 2000s Al-Qaeda wives and daughters, along with hundreds of low-level volunteers were escorted to Tehran. The women were put up at the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street. Husbands and unmarried fighters stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. From there, the Quds Force gave them false travel documents that disguised them as Ira
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground
The evidence proves Iran’s alliance and friendship with Al-Qaeda. Iran has long pursued ties to Sunni jihadists, including members of Al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission reports that in 1991 or 1992 Al–Qaeda and Iran had contacts in Sudan and that individuals linked to Al–Qaeda received training in Iran and Lebanon in the early 1990s. According to the FBI, between 1992 and 1996, several Al-Qaeda officials met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum in order to arrange a “tripartite agreement between Al-Qaeda, the National Islamic Front of Sudan, and elements of the Government of Iran”. The Iranian security services and MOIS [ Ministry of Information and Security] supported a number of terrorist camps during the period Al-Qaeda was based in Khartoum.
The 9/11 Commission found that senior Al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives in other cases. Senior Al-Qaeda operatives graduated from these training courses in Iran, according to the testimony of Al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania who was sent by bin Laden in 1995 to Iran met Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani to discuss advanced military training, with Al-Qaeda fighters. Mahfouz was also invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The results of this audience are unknown.
After 1996, when Al-Qaeda moved its headquarters and training camps to Afghanistan, links with Iran became weaker.
However, the 9/11 Commission said, the Intelligence indicated the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin’s return to Afghanistan.
Several of the 9/11 hijackers transited Iran, taking advantage of its policy of not stamping the passports of those traveling from Afghanistan—a practice that hindered Saudi security agencies’ ability to detect the terrorists when they later returned to the Kingdom.
Since 9/11, Iran has cooperated fitfully with the United States in fighting various Sunni jihadists. At times Iran has provided considerable cooperation, such as sending many jihadists back to their home countries, where pro-U.S. security services can question them.
Tehran, however, has allowed several very senior Al–Qaeda figures, such as Saif al-Adel, Saad bin Ladin, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, to remain in Iran.
According to the intelligence, Saif Al-Adel has been living in the eastern border regions of Iran under the protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, an elite military force under the direct control of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Although Iran supposedly monitors individuals linked to Al-Qaeda, some reports indicate they played a major role in the May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia—suggesting Iran is not exercising true control over them.
From left to right: Yasin al Suri, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, Sanafi al Nasr, Muhsin al Fadhli and Adel Radi al Harbi. Only Yasin al Suri is believed to be alive, but still others continue to operate in Iran.
On November 28, 2011 a U.S. District court issued a little-noticed ruling that effectively links Iran to Al-Qaeda on terrorism. In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to Al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa.
On February 16, 2012, the Treasury Department designated the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) for its support of Al-Qaeda, as well as other terrorist organizations. According to Treasury, “MOIS has facilitated the movement of Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports. MOIS also provided money and weapons to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)… and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.”
Iran appears to be keeping its options open with regard to the jihadists. On the one hand, it recognizes the heavy price to be paid if it openly backs them. Sectarian violence is a growing problem in Iraq. On the other hand, the jihadists are a potent weapon for Iran, which historically has tried to keep as many options open as possible.
This formerly clandestine network is the result of a specific “agreement” between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
Evidences
A former spokesman for the IRGC, Said Qasemi, shared a surprising revelation when he stated that the Iranian government sent agents to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train Al-Qaeda members under the cover of humanitarian workers for Iran’s Red Crescent.
Another Iranian official, Hossein Allahkaram, who is believed to be one of the operatives sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina, confirmed this, saying: “There used to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina … They were connected to us in a number of ways. Even though they were training within their own base, when they engaged in weapons training they joined us in various activities.”
Al-Qaeda members traveled to Lebanon. According to the documents, Iran provided them with “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”
The IRGC, its elite Quds Force and the Intelligence Ministry are likely three Iranian institutions have long been instrumental in helping Al-Qaeda.
According to a report in The New York Times published on November 14, 2020, which cited information from intelligence officials, the Al-Qaeda’s deputy commander in Tehran al-Masri (Saleh, Abu Mariam, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Ali, Abu Mohammed) was killed in the Pasdaran area (the same area that is the residence of Saif Al-Adel) of Tehran on Aug. 7, 2020. This has again raised questions about the Iranian regime’s relationship with the terrorist organization and has provided a fresh reminder of the need to analyze the regime’s strategy based on using the organization as an asset and providing safe havens for its leaders.
Al Masri, was seen as a likely successor to Al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was involved in the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports of Al-Masri’s killing on Iranian soil, describing them as “fake news.” Al-Qaeda has also not announced his death.
However according to the Iranian police data and Iranian state media there was a killing, in Tehran on Aug. 7. They reported about a Lebanese man and his daughter who had been killed in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Pasdaran by unknown assailants on motorcycle. They identified the man as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old history teacher, and his daughter Mariam, 27. Al-Masri must be in his 50s, as his date of birth considered to be 1968, corresponds to Dawoud’s age.
This data gives a reason to think that al-Masri was killed along with his daughter, Maryam Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah.
The theocratic Iranian establishment most likely provided Al-Masri with the resources to carry out his campaigns against the US and Gulf states.
Maryam was the widow of former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s son (Hamza bin Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden). So names of al-Masri’s daughter and woman who was killed in Tehran are the same. This increases the likelihood of the al-Masri killing version in Tehran.
The CIA released video shows Hamza bin Laden’s wedding, providing the first publicly-available images of him as a young man. The video was found in the materials seized during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011: images, and computer files. The wedding took place in Iran, where Hamza was held in a form of house arrest or imprisonment on and off for several years. Along with other members of the bin Laden family, Hamza relocated to Iran after the 9/11 hijackings supposedly in mid-2002.
Many members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups found they had no choice but to escape to Iran, particularly in light of the Iranian regime sharing the organization’s animosity toward the US and feeling they had no hope of fleeing to Pakistan given the strong CIA presence there.
Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003 but had been living freely in an upscale suburb of Tehran since 2015.
Many Al-Qaeda figures were welcomed inside the country. But ultimately their stay on Iranian soil became a highly contentious issue.
Supposedly in the beginning of 2000s Al-Qaeda wives and daughters, along with hundreds of low-level volunteers were escorted to Tehran. The women were put up at the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street. Husbands and unmarried fighters stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. From there, the Quds Force gave them false travel documents that disguised them as Ira
PART 2:
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground - IGTDS
qi Shia refugees and flew them out to other countries, where they either settled or went on to join other conflicts.
Read More: Nagorno - Karabakh, a frozen conflict is not a closed conflict
The wedding video, released by the CIA, shows a senior Al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Islambouli, sitting next to Hamza, to his right or close by, throughout the video. Islambouli, an Egyptian who is the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assassin, also lived in Iran for years.
Hamza named his mentors as Saif al Adel, Ahmed Hassan Abu al-Khayr, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, Sulayman Abu Ghaith — all of whom were senior Al-Qaeda figures detained alongside Hamza in Iran.
On July 20, 2016, the U.S. government again revealed Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. The
Treasury Department blacklisted three members of Al-Qaeda living in Iran, saying they had helped
the jihadist group. Yisra Muhammad Ibrahim Bayumi, mediated with Iranian authorities as of early 2015, the Treasury said, and helped Al-Qaeda members living in Iran. Bayumi has been residing in Iran since 2014 and had been able to facilitate Al-Qaeda funds transfers in 2015, suggesting he had some freedom to operate since moving to Iran. Abu Bakr Muhammad Ghumayn had control of the group’s financing and organization inside Iran as of 2015.
Ideological issues
The regime in Tehran insists on sectarian differences and conflicting ideological views as supposedly compelling evidence of the lack of any connection between Tehran and Al-Qaeda, and it reiterates the animosity between the two sides. However, a closer look at both the trajectory of relations between the two sides and their ideological similarities will quickly reveal the deep-rooted ties between them and show the Iranian regime’s success in forging an alliance with Al-Qaeda and employing its operatives to meet Iranian objectives.
In overcoming traditional Shiite-Sunni divides, Shia and Sunni terrorist groups have goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented doctrine. Iranian support for Sunni Muslim-dominated groups involved in the Palestinian struggle, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad prove this suppose.
In theory, there are two different schools of thought within Al-Qaeda in relation to dealing with Shiites in general and with Iran in particular. The first school of thought, spearheaded by Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mohammed Al-Maqdisi, believes that targeting Iranians and Shiites in general is not a priority for the organization because they are excused for their ignorance of the “true” understanding of Islam, which Al-Qaeda claims to monopolize. Also, this school is somewhat more lenient and flexible in its attitude toward Shiites when compared to the second school of thought, which will be discussed in the following lines. According to this first school of thought, precedence should be given to confronting the more evident enemy: The West, the US and those aligned with them.
The second school of thought within Al-Qaeda was spearheaded by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a student of Al-Maqdisi and the assassinated leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who believed in the necessity of expanding the organization’s terrorist operations against Shiites with the aim of sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq.
Reasons to cooperate
Iran and Al-Qaeda share several common interests. Tehran is attracted to the organization because they both view America as their main enemy, and the group has carried out several successful terrorist attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda is also a threat to Gulf states which Iran views as regional rivals.
A document presumably authored by Osama bin Laden in 2007 refers to Iran as Al-Qaeda’s “main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.” That same letter referred to the “hostages” held by Iran, meaning those Al-Qaeda figures who were held in some form of detention and not allowed to freely operate.
«Under the terms of the agreement between Al-Qaeda and Iran,” the US Treasury reported, “Al-Qaeda must refrain from conducting any operations within Iranian territory and recruiting operatives inside Iran while keeping Iranian authorities informed of their activities.” As long as Al-Qaeda didn’t violate these terms, “the Government of Iran gave the Iran-based Al-Qaeda network freedom of operation and uninhibited ability to travel for extremists and their families.”
According to the 2012 statement by the State Department, Iran “allowed AQ facilitators Muhsin al-Fadhli and Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and to Syria.” Fadhli “began working with the Iran-based AQ facilitation network in 2009,” was “later arrested by Iranian authorities,” but then released in 2011 so he could assume “leadership of the Iran-based AQ facilitation network.”
In September 2015, Sky News reported that Iran reached an agreement with Al-Qaeda members in which they “agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Instead, al-Zawahiri says they are in Syria to “develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations.”
Some intelligence agencies believe, however, AQ leaders, stationed in Iran might be able to travel to Syria, where they could make use of the ungoverned and chaotic landscape to plot attacks outside the country – having agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al Assad, which is backed by Tehran.
By having Al-Qaeda members and affiliates on its soil, Iran found additional assets for extending its terrorist capabilities in the region and beyond. These assets had the potential to carry out whatever terrorist operations the Iranian regime wished to mount or potentially serve as a useful bargaining chip with the US, to be swapped — if necessary — to achieve its interests against the US. Such attacks can be carried without suspicion of Tehran’s involvement in them, especially in the Gulf region.
Al-Qaeda provides the Iranian authorities with the opportunity to increase their military presence and influence in other countries, such as Iraq, on the pretext of fighting against terrorist groups. We think this is the same motivation as in case with the Taliban. This is why Al-Qaeda has carried out attacks in many countries but has not targeted Iran.
According to the documents seized after the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Bin Laden was not against attacking Iran in principle; he simply did not think the costs of such action were worth it.
So, Iranian authorities have guarantees of Al-Qaeda neutrality toward Tehran regime.
According to the intelligence sources, while the Shi’a theocracy of Iran and the Sunni extremist group Al-Qaeda were theoretical enemies, there has been an “understanding” that the two would avoid attacks on one another and focus on battling the “shared threat” of the West.
Bin Laden’s files show that he was troubled by Iran’s attempt to expand across the Middle East and he conceived of a plan to combat the Shiite jihadists’ growing footprint. This is why the two sides are clearly at odds in Syria and Yemen, where they have fought each other and affiliated proxies for several years.
Having contacts with senior Al-Qaeda commanders, Tehran has capacity to establish indirect talks with Sunni Gulf regimes as an effective mechanism of Iranian foreign policy.
Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi is anchored in efforts to destabilize the region and create chaos, which is a ripe environment that the Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies and militia groups can exploit and prosper from. Meanwhile, Al-Zarqawi directed his extremist vision toward the Shiites in Iraq in order to cause the greatest possible disruption for the remaining US troops in Iraq so that to drive them out of the country, enabling Iran to take control of Iraq. It is worth noting that Al-Zarqawi had first fled to Iran following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan before moving to Iraq.
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground - IGTDS
qi Shia refugees and flew them out to other countries, where they either settled or went on to join other conflicts.
Read More: Nagorno - Karabakh, a frozen conflict is not a closed conflict
The wedding video, released by the CIA, shows a senior Al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Islambouli, sitting next to Hamza, to his right or close by, throughout the video. Islambouli, an Egyptian who is the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assassin, also lived in Iran for years.
Hamza named his mentors as Saif al Adel, Ahmed Hassan Abu al-Khayr, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, Sulayman Abu Ghaith — all of whom were senior Al-Qaeda figures detained alongside Hamza in Iran.
On July 20, 2016, the U.S. government again revealed Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. The
Treasury Department blacklisted three members of Al-Qaeda living in Iran, saying they had helped
the jihadist group. Yisra Muhammad Ibrahim Bayumi, mediated with Iranian authorities as of early 2015, the Treasury said, and helped Al-Qaeda members living in Iran. Bayumi has been residing in Iran since 2014 and had been able to facilitate Al-Qaeda funds transfers in 2015, suggesting he had some freedom to operate since moving to Iran. Abu Bakr Muhammad Ghumayn had control of the group’s financing and organization inside Iran as of 2015.
Ideological issues
The regime in Tehran insists on sectarian differences and conflicting ideological views as supposedly compelling evidence of the lack of any connection between Tehran and Al-Qaeda, and it reiterates the animosity between the two sides. However, a closer look at both the trajectory of relations between the two sides and their ideological similarities will quickly reveal the deep-rooted ties between them and show the Iranian regime’s success in forging an alliance with Al-Qaeda and employing its operatives to meet Iranian objectives.
In overcoming traditional Shiite-Sunni divides, Shia and Sunni terrorist groups have goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented doctrine. Iranian support for Sunni Muslim-dominated groups involved in the Palestinian struggle, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad prove this suppose.
In theory, there are two different schools of thought within Al-Qaeda in relation to dealing with Shiites in general and with Iran in particular. The first school of thought, spearheaded by Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mohammed Al-Maqdisi, believes that targeting Iranians and Shiites in general is not a priority for the organization because they are excused for their ignorance of the “true” understanding of Islam, which Al-Qaeda claims to monopolize. Also, this school is somewhat more lenient and flexible in its attitude toward Shiites when compared to the second school of thought, which will be discussed in the following lines. According to this first school of thought, precedence should be given to confronting the more evident enemy: The West, the US and those aligned with them.
The second school of thought within Al-Qaeda was spearheaded by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a student of Al-Maqdisi and the assassinated leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who believed in the necessity of expanding the organization’s terrorist operations against Shiites with the aim of sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq.
Reasons to cooperate
Iran and Al-Qaeda share several common interests. Tehran is attracted to the organization because they both view America as their main enemy, and the group has carried out several successful terrorist attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda is also a threat to Gulf states which Iran views as regional rivals.
A document presumably authored by Osama bin Laden in 2007 refers to Iran as Al-Qaeda’s “main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.” That same letter referred to the “hostages” held by Iran, meaning those Al-Qaeda figures who were held in some form of detention and not allowed to freely operate.
«Under the terms of the agreement between Al-Qaeda and Iran,” the US Treasury reported, “Al-Qaeda must refrain from conducting any operations within Iranian territory and recruiting operatives inside Iran while keeping Iranian authorities informed of their activities.” As long as Al-Qaeda didn’t violate these terms, “the Government of Iran gave the Iran-based Al-Qaeda network freedom of operation and uninhibited ability to travel for extremists and their families.”
According to the 2012 statement by the State Department, Iran “allowed AQ facilitators Muhsin al-Fadhli and Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and to Syria.” Fadhli “began working with the Iran-based AQ facilitation network in 2009,” was “later arrested by Iranian authorities,” but then released in 2011 so he could assume “leadership of the Iran-based AQ facilitation network.”
In September 2015, Sky News reported that Iran reached an agreement with Al-Qaeda members in which they “agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Instead, al-Zawahiri says they are in Syria to “develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations.”
Some intelligence agencies believe, however, AQ leaders, stationed in Iran might be able to travel to Syria, where they could make use of the ungoverned and chaotic landscape to plot attacks outside the country – having agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al Assad, which is backed by Tehran.
By having Al-Qaeda members and affiliates on its soil, Iran found additional assets for extending its terrorist capabilities in the region and beyond. These assets had the potential to carry out whatever terrorist operations the Iranian regime wished to mount or potentially serve as a useful bargaining chip with the US, to be swapped — if necessary — to achieve its interests against the US. Such attacks can be carried without suspicion of Tehran’s involvement in them, especially in the Gulf region.
Al-Qaeda provides the Iranian authorities with the opportunity to increase their military presence and influence in other countries, such as Iraq, on the pretext of fighting against terrorist groups. We think this is the same motivation as in case with the Taliban. This is why Al-Qaeda has carried out attacks in many countries but has not targeted Iran.
According to the documents seized after the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Bin Laden was not against attacking Iran in principle; he simply did not think the costs of such action were worth it.
So, Iranian authorities have guarantees of Al-Qaeda neutrality toward Tehran regime.
According to the intelligence sources, while the Shi’a theocracy of Iran and the Sunni extremist group Al-Qaeda were theoretical enemies, there has been an “understanding” that the two would avoid attacks on one another and focus on battling the “shared threat” of the West.
Bin Laden’s files show that he was troubled by Iran’s attempt to expand across the Middle East and he conceived of a plan to combat the Shiite jihadists’ growing footprint. This is why the two sides are clearly at odds in Syria and Yemen, where they have fought each other and affiliated proxies for several years.
Having contacts with senior Al-Qaeda commanders, Tehran has capacity to establish indirect talks with Sunni Gulf regimes as an effective mechanism of Iranian foreign policy.
Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi is anchored in efforts to destabilize the region and create chaos, which is a ripe environment that the Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies and militia groups can exploit and prosper from. Meanwhile, Al-Zarqawi directed his extremist vision toward the Shiites in Iraq in order to cause the greatest possible disruption for the remaining US troops in Iraq so that to drive them out of the country, enabling Iran to take control of Iraq. It is worth noting that Al-Zarqawi had first fled to Iran following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan before moving to Iraq.
https://igtds.org/blog/2020/11/30/iranian-links-with-al-qaeda-beyond-ideological-ground/
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground
The evidence proves Iran’s alliance and friendship with Al-Qaeda. Iran has long pursued ties to Sunni jihadists, including members of Al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission reports that in 1991 or 1992 Al–Qaeda and Iran had contacts in Sudan and that individuals linked to Al–Qaeda received training in Iran and Lebanon in the early 1990s. According to the FBI, between 1992 and 1996, several Al-Qaeda officials met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum in order to arrange a “tripartite agreement between Al-Qaeda, the National Islamic Front of Sudan, and elements of the Government of Iran”. The Iranian security services and MOIS [ Ministry of Information and Security] supported a number of terrorist camps during the period Al-Qaeda was based in Khartoum.
The 9/11 Commission found that senior Al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives in other cases. Senior Al-Qaeda operatives graduated from these training courses in Iran, according to the testimony of Al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania who was sent by bin Laden in 1995 to Iran met Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani to discuss advanced military training, with Al-Qaeda fighters. Mahfouz was also invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The results of this audience are unknown.
After 1996, when Al-Qaeda moved its headquarters and training camps to Afghanistan, links with Iran became weaker.
However, the 9/11 Commission said, the Intelligence indicated the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin’s return to Afghanistan.
Several of the 9/11 hijackers transited Iran, taking advantage of its policy of not stamping the passports of those traveling from Afghanistan—a practice that hindered Saudi security agencies’ ability to detect the terrorists when they later returned to the Kingdom.
Since 9/11, Iran has cooperated fitfully with the United States in fighting various Sunni jihadists. At times Iran has provided considerable cooperation, such as sending many jihadists back to their home countries, where pro-U.S. security services can question them.
Tehran, however, has allowed several very senior Al–Qaeda figures, such as Saif al-Adel, Saad bin Ladin, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, to remain in Iran.
According to the intelligence, Saif Al-Adel has been living in the eastern border regions of Iran under the protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, an elite military force under the direct control of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Although Iran supposedly monitors individuals linked to Al-Qaeda, some reports indicate they played a major role in the May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia—suggesting Iran is not exercising true control over them.
From left to right: Yasin al Suri, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, Sanafi al Nasr, Muhsin al Fadhli and Adel Radi al Harbi. Only Yasin al Suri is believed to be alive, but still others continue to operate in Iran.
On November 28, 2011 a U.S. District court issued a little-noticed ruling that effectively links Iran to Al-Qaeda on terrorism. In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to Al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa.
On February 16, 2012, the Treasury Department designated the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) for its support of Al-Qaeda, as well as other terrorist organizations. According to Treasury, “MOIS has facilitated the movement of Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports. MOIS also provided money and weapons to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)… and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.”
Iran appears to be keeping its options open with regard to the jihadists. On the one hand, it recognizes the heavy price to be paid if it openly backs them. Sectarian violence is a growing problem in Iraq. On the other hand, the jihadists are a potent weapon for Iran, which historically has tried to keep as many options open as possible.
This formerly clandestine network is the result of a specific “agreement” between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
Evidences
A former spokesman for the IRGC, Said Qasemi, shared a surprising revelation when he stated that the Iranian government sent agents to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train Al-Qaeda members under the cover of humanitarian workers for Iran’s Red Crescent.
Another Iranian official, Hossein Allahkaram, who is believed to be one of the operatives sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina, confirmed this, saying: “There used to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina … They were connected to us in a number of ways. Even though they were training within their own base, when they engaged in weapons training they joined us in various activities.”
Al-Qaeda members traveled to Lebanon. According to the documents, Iran provided them with “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”
The IRGC, its elite Quds Force and the Intelligence Ministry are likely three Iranian institutions have long been instrumental in helping Al-Qaeda.
According to a report in The New York Times published on November 14, 2020, which cited information from intelligence officials, the Al-Qaeda’s deputy commander in Tehran al-Masri (Saleh, Abu Mariam, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Ali, Abu Mohammed) was killed in the Pasdaran area (the same area that is the residence of Saif Al-Adel) of Tehran on Aug. 7, 2020. This has again raised questions about the Iranian regime’s relationship with the terrorist organization and has provided a fresh reminder of the need to analyze the regime’s strategy based on using the organization as an asset and providing safe havens for its leaders.
Al Masri, was seen as a likely successor to Al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was involved in the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports of Al-Masri’s killing on Iranian soil, describing them as “fake news.” Al-Qaeda has also not announced his death.
However according to the Iranian police data and Iranian state media there was a killing, in Tehran on Aug. 7. They reported about a Lebanese man and his daughter who had been killed in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Pasdaran by unknown assailants on motorcycle. They identified the man as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old history teacher, and his daughter Mariam, 27. Al-Masri must be in his 50s, as his date of birth considered to be 1968, corresponds to Dawoud’s age.
This data gives a reason to think that al-Masri was killed along with his daughter, Maryam Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah.
The theocratic Iranian establishment most likely provided Al-Masri with the resources to carry out his campaigns against the US and Gulf states.
Maryam was the widow of former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s son (Hamza bin Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden). So names of al-Masri’s daughter and woman who was killed in Tehran are the same. This increases the likelihood of the al-Masri killing version in Tehran.
The CIA released video shows Hamza bin Laden’s wedding, providing the first publicly-available images of him as a young man. The video was found in the materials seized during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011: images, and computer files. The wedding took place in Iran, where Hamza was held in a form of house arrest or imprisonment on and off for several years. Along with other members of the bin Laden family, Hamza relocated to Iran after the 9/11 hijackings supposedly in mid-2002.
Many members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups found they had no choice but to escape to Iran, particularly in light of the Iranian regime sharing the organization’s animosity toward the US and feeling they had no hope of fleeing to Pakistan given the strong CIA presence there.
Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003 but had been living freely in an upscale suburb of Tehran since 2015.
Many Al-Qaeda figures were welcomed inside the country. But ultimately their stay on Iranian soil became a highly contentious issue.
Supposedly in the beginning of 2000s Al-Qaeda wives and daughters, along with hundreds of low-level volunteers were escorted to Tehran. The women were put up at the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street. Husbands and unmarried fighters stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. From there, the Quds Force gave them false travel documents that disguised them as Iraqi Shia refugees and flew them out to other countries, where they either settled or went on to join other conflicts.
Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground
The evidence proves Iran’s alliance and friendship with Al-Qaeda. Iran has long pursued ties to Sunni jihadists, including members of Al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission reports that in 1991 or 1992 Al–Qaeda and Iran had contacts in Sudan and that individuals linked to Al–Qaeda received training in Iran and Lebanon in the early 1990s. According to the FBI, between 1992 and 1996, several Al-Qaeda officials met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum in order to arrange a “tripartite agreement between Al-Qaeda, the National Islamic Front of Sudan, and elements of the Government of Iran”. The Iranian security services and MOIS [ Ministry of Information and Security] supported a number of terrorist camps during the period Al-Qaeda was based in Khartoum.
The 9/11 Commission found that senior Al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives in other cases. Senior Al-Qaeda operatives graduated from these training courses in Iran, according to the testimony of Al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania who was sent by bin Laden in 1995 to Iran met Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani to discuss advanced military training, with Al-Qaeda fighters. Mahfouz was also invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The results of this audience are unknown.
After 1996, when Al-Qaeda moved its headquarters and training camps to Afghanistan, links with Iran became weaker.
However, the 9/11 Commission said, the Intelligence indicated the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin’s return to Afghanistan.
Several of the 9/11 hijackers transited Iran, taking advantage of its policy of not stamping the passports of those traveling from Afghanistan—a practice that hindered Saudi security agencies’ ability to detect the terrorists when they later returned to the Kingdom.
Since 9/11, Iran has cooperated fitfully with the United States in fighting various Sunni jihadists. At times Iran has provided considerable cooperation, such as sending many jihadists back to their home countries, where pro-U.S. security services can question them.
Tehran, however, has allowed several very senior Al–Qaeda figures, such as Saif al-Adel, Saad bin Ladin, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, to remain in Iran.
According to the intelligence, Saif Al-Adel has been living in the eastern border regions of Iran under the protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, an elite military force under the direct control of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Although Iran supposedly monitors individuals linked to Al-Qaeda, some reports indicate they played a major role in the May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia—suggesting Iran is not exercising true control over them.
From left to right: Yasin al Suri, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, Sanafi al Nasr, Muhsin al Fadhli and Adel Radi al Harbi. Only Yasin al Suri is believed to be alive, but still others continue to operate in Iran.
On November 28, 2011 a U.S. District court issued a little-noticed ruling that effectively links Iran to Al-Qaeda on terrorism. In a 45-page opinion, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran “provided material aid and support to Al-Qaeda for the 1998 embassy bombings” in East Africa.
On February 16, 2012, the Treasury Department designated the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) for its support of Al-Qaeda, as well as other terrorist organizations. According to Treasury, “MOIS has facilitated the movement of Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran and provided them with documents, identification cards, and passports. MOIS also provided money and weapons to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)… and negotiated prisoner releases of AQI operatives.”
Iran appears to be keeping its options open with regard to the jihadists. On the one hand, it recognizes the heavy price to be paid if it openly backs them. Sectarian violence is a growing problem in Iraq. On the other hand, the jihadists are a potent weapon for Iran, which historically has tried to keep as many options open as possible.
This formerly clandestine network is the result of a specific “agreement” between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda’s leadership.
Evidences
A former spokesman for the IRGC, Said Qasemi, shared a surprising revelation when he stated that the Iranian government sent agents to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train Al-Qaeda members under the cover of humanitarian workers for Iran’s Red Crescent.
Another Iranian official, Hossein Allahkaram, who is believed to be one of the operatives sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina, confirmed this, saying: “There used to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina … They were connected to us in a number of ways. Even though they were training within their own base, when they engaged in weapons training they joined us in various activities.”
Al-Qaeda members traveled to Lebanon. According to the documents, Iran provided them with “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”
The IRGC, its elite Quds Force and the Intelligence Ministry are likely three Iranian institutions have long been instrumental in helping Al-Qaeda.
According to a report in The New York Times published on November 14, 2020, which cited information from intelligence officials, the Al-Qaeda’s deputy commander in Tehran al-Masri (Saleh, Abu Mariam, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Ali, Abu Mohammed) was killed in the Pasdaran area (the same area that is the residence of Saif Al-Adel) of Tehran on Aug. 7, 2020. This has again raised questions about the Iranian regime’s relationship with the terrorist organization and has provided a fresh reminder of the need to analyze the regime’s strategy based on using the organization as an asset and providing safe havens for its leaders.
Al Masri, was seen as a likely successor to Al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He was involved in the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports of Al-Masri’s killing on Iranian soil, describing them as “fake news.” Al-Qaeda has also not announced his death.
However according to the Iranian police data and Iranian state media there was a killing, in Tehran on Aug. 7. They reported about a Lebanese man and his daughter who had been killed in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Pasdaran by unknown assailants on motorcycle. They identified the man as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old history teacher, and his daughter Mariam, 27. Al-Masri must be in his 50s, as his date of birth considered to be 1968, corresponds to Dawoud’s age.
This data gives a reason to think that al-Masri was killed along with his daughter, Maryam Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah.
The theocratic Iranian establishment most likely provided Al-Masri with the resources to carry out his campaigns against the US and Gulf states.
Maryam was the widow of former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s son (Hamza bin Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden). So names of al-Masri’s daughter and woman who was killed in Tehran are the same. This increases the likelihood of the al-Masri killing version in Tehran.
The CIA released video shows Hamza bin Laden’s wedding, providing the first publicly-available images of him as a young man. The video was found in the materials seized during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011: images, and computer files. The wedding took place in Iran, where Hamza was held in a form of house arrest or imprisonment on and off for several years. Along with other members of the bin Laden family, Hamza relocated to Iran after the 9/11 hijackings supposedly in mid-2002.
Many members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups found they had no choice but to escape to Iran, particularly in light of the Iranian regime sharing the organization’s animosity toward the US and feeling they had no hope of fleeing to Pakistan given the strong CIA presence there.
Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003 but had been living freely in an upscale suburb of Tehran since 2015.
Many Al-Qaeda figures were welcomed inside the country. But ultimately their stay on Iranian soil became a highly contentious issue.
Supposedly in the beginning of 2000s Al-Qaeda wives and daughters, along with hundreds of low-level volunteers were escorted to Tehran. The women were put up at the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street. Husbands and unmarried fighters stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. From there, the Quds Force gave them false travel documents that disguised them as Iraqi Shia refugees and flew them out to other countries, where they either settled or went on to join other conflicts.
PART 2: Iranian links with Al-Qaeda beyond ideological ground - IGTDS
Read More: Iran - The death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, another test of the vulnerability of IRI internal security
The wedding video, released by the CIA, shows a senior Al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Islambouli, sitting next to Hamza, to his right or close by, throughout the video. Islambouli, an Egyptian who is the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assassin, also lived in Iran for years.
Hamza named his mentors as Saif al Adel, Ahmed Hassan Abu al-Khayr, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, Sulayman Abu Ghaith — all of whom were senior Al-Qaeda figures detained alongside Hamza in Iran.
On July 20, 2016, the U.S. government again revealed Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. The
Treasury Department blacklisted three members of Al-Qaeda living in Iran, saying they had helped
the jihadist group. Yisra Muhammad Ibrahim Bayumi, mediated with Iranian authorities as of early 2015, the Treasury said, and helped Al-Qaeda members living in Iran. Bayumi has been residing in Iran since 2014 and had been able to facilitate Al-Qaeda funds transfers in 2015, suggesting he had some freedom to operate since moving to Iran. Abu Bakr Muhammad Ghumayn had control of the group’s financing and organization inside Iran as of 2015.
Ideological issues
The regime in Tehran insists on sectarian differences and conflicting ideological views as supposedly compelling evidence of the lack of any connection between Tehran and Al-Qaeda, and it reiterates the animosity between the two sides. However, a closer look at both the trajectory of relations between the two sides and their ideological similarities will quickly reveal the deep-rooted ties between them and show the Iranian regime’s success in forging an alliance with Al-Qaeda and employing its operatives to meet Iranian objectives.
In overcoming traditional Shiite-Sunni divides, Shia and Sunni terrorist groups have goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented doctrine. Iranian support for Sunni Muslim-dominated groups involved in the Palestinian struggle, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad prove this suppose.
In theory, there are two different schools of thought within Al-Qaeda in relation to dealing with Shiites in general and with Iran in particular. The first school of thought, spearheaded by Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mohammed Al-Maqdisi, believes that targeting Iranians and Shiites in general is not a priority for the organization because they are excused for their ignorance of the “true” understanding of Islam, which Al-Qaeda claims to monopolize. Also, this school is somewhat more lenient and flexible in its attitude toward Shiites when compared to the second school of thought, which will be discussed in the following lines. According to this first school of thought, precedence should be given to confronting the more evident enemy: The West, the US and those aligned with them.
The second school of thought within Al-Qaeda was spearheaded by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a student of Al-Maqdisi and the assassinated leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who believed in the necessity of expanding the organization’s terrorist operations against Shiites with the aim of sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq.
Reasons to cooperate
Iran and Al-Qaeda share several common interests. Tehran is attracted to the organization because they both view America as their main enemy, and the group has carried out several successful terrorist attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda is also a threat to Gulf states which Iran views as regional rivals.
A document presumably authored by Osama bin Laden in 2007 refers to Iran as Al-Qaeda’s “main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.” That same letter referred to the “hostages” held by Iran, meaning those Al-Qaeda figures who were held in some form of detention and not allowed to freely operate.
«Under the terms of the agreement between Al-Qaeda and Iran,” the US Treasury reported, “Al-Qaeda must refrain from conducting any operations within Iranian territory and recruiting operatives inside Iran while keeping Iranian authorities informed of their activities.” As long as Al-Qaeda didn’t violate these terms, “the Government of Iran gave the Iran-based Al-Qaeda network freedom of operation and uninhibited ability to travel for extremists and their families.”
According to the 2012 statement by the State Department, Iran “allowed AQ facilitators Muhsin al-Fadhli and Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and to Syria.” Fadhli “began working with the Iran-based AQ facilitation network in 2009,” was “later arrested by Iranian authorities,” but then released in 2011 so he could assume “leadership of the Iran-based AQ facilitation network.”
In September 2015, Sky News reported that Iran reached an agreement with Al-Qaeda members in which they “agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Instead, al-Zawahiri says they are in Syria to “develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations.”
Some intelligence agencies believe, however, AQ leaders, stationed in Iran might be able to travel to Syria, where they could make use of the ungoverned and chaotic landscape to plot attacks outside the country – having agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al Assad, which is backed by Tehran.
By having Al-Qaeda members and affiliates on its soil, Iran found additional assets for extending its terrorist capabilities in the region and beyond. These assets had the potential to carry out whatever terrorist operations the Iranian regime wished to mount or potentially serve as a useful bargaining chip with the US, to be swapped — if necessary — to achieve its interests against the US. Such attacks can be carried without suspicion of Tehran’s involvement in them, especially in the Gulf region.
Al-Qaeda provides the Iranian authorities with the opportunity to increase their military presence and influence in other countries, such as Iraq, on the pretext of fighting against terrorist groups. We think this is the same motivation as in case with the Taliban. This is why Al-Qaeda has carried out attacks in many countries but has not targeted Iran.
According to the documents seized after the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Bin Laden was not against attacking Iran in principle; he simply did not think the costs of such action were worth it.
So, Iranian authorities have guarantees of Al-Qaeda neutrality toward Tehran regime.
According to the intelligence sources, while the Shi’a theocracy of Iran and the Sunni extremist group Al-Qaeda were theoretical enemies, there has been an “understanding” that the two would avoid attacks on one another and focus on battling the “shared threat” of the West.
Bin Laden’s files show that he was troubled by Iran’s attempt to expand across the Middle East and he conceived of a plan to combat the Shiite jihadists’ growing footprint. This is why the two sides are clearly at odds in Syria and Yemen, where they have fought each other and affiliated proxies for several years.
Having contacts with senior Al-Qaeda commanders, Tehran has capacity to establish indirect talks with Sunni Gulf regimes as an effective mechanism of Iranian foreign policy.
Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi is anchored in efforts to destabilize the region and create chaos, which is a ripe environment that the Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies and militia groups can exploit and prosper from. Meanwhile, Al-Zarqawi directed his extremist vision toward the Shiites in Iraq in order to cause the greatest possible disruption for the remaining US troops in Iraq so that to drive them out of the country, enabling Iran to take control of Iraq. It is worth noting that Al-Zarqawi had first fled to Iran following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan before moving to Iraq.
Read More: Iran - The death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, another test of the vulnerability of IRI internal security
The wedding video, released by the CIA, shows a senior Al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Islambouli, sitting next to Hamza, to his right or close by, throughout the video. Islambouli, an Egyptian who is the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assassin, also lived in Iran for years.
Hamza named his mentors as Saif al Adel, Ahmed Hassan Abu al-Khayr, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, Sulayman Abu Ghaith — all of whom were senior Al-Qaeda figures detained alongside Hamza in Iran.
On July 20, 2016, the U.S. government again revealed Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. The
Treasury Department blacklisted three members of Al-Qaeda living in Iran, saying they had helped
the jihadist group. Yisra Muhammad Ibrahim Bayumi, mediated with Iranian authorities as of early 2015, the Treasury said, and helped Al-Qaeda members living in Iran. Bayumi has been residing in Iran since 2014 and had been able to facilitate Al-Qaeda funds transfers in 2015, suggesting he had some freedom to operate since moving to Iran. Abu Bakr Muhammad Ghumayn had control of the group’s financing and organization inside Iran as of 2015.
Ideological issues
The regime in Tehran insists on sectarian differences and conflicting ideological views as supposedly compelling evidence of the lack of any connection between Tehran and Al-Qaeda, and it reiterates the animosity between the two sides. However, a closer look at both the trajectory of relations between the two sides and their ideological similarities will quickly reveal the deep-rooted ties between them and show the Iranian regime’s success in forging an alliance with Al-Qaeda and employing its operatives to meet Iranian objectives.
In overcoming traditional Shiite-Sunni divides, Shia and Sunni terrorist groups have goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented doctrine. Iranian support for Sunni Muslim-dominated groups involved in the Palestinian struggle, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad prove this suppose.
In theory, there are two different schools of thought within Al-Qaeda in relation to dealing with Shiites in general and with Iran in particular. The first school of thought, spearheaded by Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mohammed Al-Maqdisi, believes that targeting Iranians and Shiites in general is not a priority for the organization because they are excused for their ignorance of the “true” understanding of Islam, which Al-Qaeda claims to monopolize. Also, this school is somewhat more lenient and flexible in its attitude toward Shiites when compared to the second school of thought, which will be discussed in the following lines. According to this first school of thought, precedence should be given to confronting the more evident enemy: The West, the US and those aligned with them.
The second school of thought within Al-Qaeda was spearheaded by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a student of Al-Maqdisi and the assassinated leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who believed in the necessity of expanding the organization’s terrorist operations against Shiites with the aim of sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq.
Reasons to cooperate
Iran and Al-Qaeda share several common interests. Tehran is attracted to the organization because they both view America as their main enemy, and the group has carried out several successful terrorist attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda is also a threat to Gulf states which Iran views as regional rivals.
A document presumably authored by Osama bin Laden in 2007 refers to Iran as Al-Qaeda’s “main artery for funds, personnel, and communication.” That same letter referred to the “hostages” held by Iran, meaning those Al-Qaeda figures who were held in some form of detention and not allowed to freely operate.
«Under the terms of the agreement between Al-Qaeda and Iran,” the US Treasury reported, “Al-Qaeda must refrain from conducting any operations within Iranian territory and recruiting operatives inside Iran while keeping Iranian authorities informed of their activities.” As long as Al-Qaeda didn’t violate these terms, “the Government of Iran gave the Iran-based Al-Qaeda network freedom of operation and uninhibited ability to travel for extremists and their families.”
According to the 2012 statement by the State Department, Iran “allowed AQ facilitators Muhsin al-Fadhli and Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and to Syria.” Fadhli “began working with the Iran-based AQ facilitation network in 2009,” was “later arrested by Iranian authorities,” but then released in 2011 so he could assume “leadership of the Iran-based AQ facilitation network.”
In September 2015, Sky News reported that Iran reached an agreement with Al-Qaeda members in which they “agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Instead, al-Zawahiri says they are in Syria to “develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations.”
Some intelligence agencies believe, however, AQ leaders, stationed in Iran might be able to travel to Syria, where they could make use of the ungoverned and chaotic landscape to plot attacks outside the country – having agreed not to turn their guns on the regime of Bashar al Assad, which is backed by Tehran.
By having Al-Qaeda members and affiliates on its soil, Iran found additional assets for extending its terrorist capabilities in the region and beyond. These assets had the potential to carry out whatever terrorist operations the Iranian regime wished to mount or potentially serve as a useful bargaining chip with the US, to be swapped — if necessary — to achieve its interests against the US. Such attacks can be carried without suspicion of Tehran’s involvement in them, especially in the Gulf region.
Al-Qaeda provides the Iranian authorities with the opportunity to increase their military presence and influence in other countries, such as Iraq, on the pretext of fighting against terrorist groups. We think this is the same motivation as in case with the Taliban. This is why Al-Qaeda has carried out attacks in many countries but has not targeted Iran.
According to the documents seized after the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Bin Laden was not against attacking Iran in principle; he simply did not think the costs of such action were worth it.
So, Iranian authorities have guarantees of Al-Qaeda neutrality toward Tehran regime.
According to the intelligence sources, while the Shi’a theocracy of Iran and the Sunni extremist group Al-Qaeda were theoretical enemies, there has been an “understanding” that the two would avoid attacks on one another and focus on battling the “shared threat” of the West.
Bin Laden’s files show that he was troubled by Iran’s attempt to expand across the Middle East and he conceived of a plan to combat the Shiite jihadists’ growing footprint. This is why the two sides are clearly at odds in Syria and Yemen, where they have fought each other and affiliated proxies for several years.
Having contacts with senior Al-Qaeda commanders, Tehran has capacity to establish indirect talks with Sunni Gulf regimes as an effective mechanism of Iranian foreign policy.
Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi is anchored in efforts to destabilize the region and create chaos, which is a ripe environment that the Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies and militia groups can exploit and prosper from. Meanwhile, Al-Zarqawi directed his extremist vision toward the Shiites in Iraq in order to cause the greatest possible disruption for the remaining US troops in Iraq so that to drive them out of the country, enabling Iran to take control of Iraq. It is worth noting that Al-Zarqawi had first fled to Iran following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan before moving to Iraq.
The Iran-al-Qa'ida Axis - United States Department of State
The Iran-al-Qa’ida Axis
SECRETARY POMPEO: Good morning, everyone.
Thank you, Wang Xiyue, for that very kind introduction and those remarkable words, words that were your own. We’re blessed to have you here today.
Look, as a lot – as you said, a lot of people worked really hard to get you home. America never gives up. We never give in. We never leave anybody behind.
We work, every day and every hour – we will continue to do so – to bring back every American held hostage in Iran, all over – and all over the world back to their families. You simply can’t put America first if you don’t put Americans first.
We have many distinguished guests in the room today. Thank you especially to the ambassadors from different countries, distinguished scholars, and members of the Iranian American community who have joined us.
And thank you to – for the gracious hosting here at the National Press Club.
I know many members of this club do dogged reporting to keep Americans informed on world affairs and that a free press is a staple of a healthy democracy. More speech is important. And I can’t say I always agree with everything that’s written, but what you write is read. And it matters, get it right, get the truth, and America will prosper.
I want to start with a quick story in these remarks today.
Many of you here may recognize the name Abu Muhammad al-Masri, also known as Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah.
He was al-Qa’ida’s worldwide number two, and on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for slaughtering members of our State Department family in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings of 1998. More than 200 people, including 12 Americans, lost their lives in those attacks.
The New York Times reported in November that al-Masri was shot to death on the streets of Tehran.
Today, I can confirm, for the first time, his death on August 7th of last year.
The Times wrote, quote, “That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and al-Qa’ida are bitter enemies,” end of quote.
It could not be more wrong. It wasn’t “surprising” at all. And more importantly, they’re not enemies.
Al-Masri’s presence inside Iran points to the reason that we’re here today. It’s what I want to talk about in these remarks.
al-Qa’ida has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As a result, bin Laden’s wicked creation is poised to gain strength and capabilities.
We ignore this Iran-al-Qa’ida nexus at our own peril.
We need to acknowledge it.
We must confront it.
Indeed, we must defeat it.
Now, I know this news will come as a surprise to many Americans.
We had al-Qa’ida on the ropes after 9/11, thanks to sustained efforts of our brave soldiers, intelligence officers, diplomats, NATO allies, many others who work tirelessly to defend freedom. There are far fewer al-Qa’ida operatives in Afghanistan today than there have been in decades. That remains true.
This is an enormous tribute to American resolve, American ingenuity, American leadership, and frankly, raw American military strength.
That effort drove al-Qa’ida to search for a safer haven, and they found one.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was the perfect choice.
al-Qa’ida has, in fact, carried on a relationship with Tehran for nearly three decades, as the 9/11 Commission clearly established.
In the early ’90s, al-Qa’ida operatives traveled to Iran and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon – the heartland of Hizballah – for explosives training.
In the period before 9/11, the Iranian regime told border inspectors not to stamp al-Qa’ida members’ passports when they entered or left Iran on their way to or from Afghanistan. This was to help them avoid suspicion when they returned to their home countries.
And while there’s no evidence Iran helped plan or had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, at least eight of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran between October of 2000 and February of 2001.
Indeed, in 2011, a federal judge in New York ruled that Iran had provided support for the 9/11 attacks, based on the role it played in furthering al-Qa’ida operatives’ plans.
And of course, after 9/11, hundreds of al-Qa’ida terrorists and their families fleeing America’s righteous vengeance took refuge there inside of Iran.
A letter from bin Laden, found by the Navy SEALS during the Abbottabad raid, sums up the relationship since 9/11 very well:
In his own words, quote, “Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication…There is no need to fight with Iran unless you are forced to,” end of quote. These are bin Laden’s own words about his and al-Qa’ida’s relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course, there’s more evidence as well. In 2013, the Canadian Government disrupted an al-Qa’ida plot against a passenger train that linked Toronto and New York. The Canadian Government stated that the plotters received, quote “direction and guidance,” end of quote, from al-Qa’ida members living inside of Iran. No, New York Times, not a surprise.
Iran arrests students, religious minorities, and environmentalists, but not Jihadist al-Qa’ida killers.
Yet in spite of all the assistance the Khamenei regime provided to al-Qa’ida, Tehran actually imposed tight restrictions on its operatives inside of Iran for some time.
The regime very closely monitored al-Qa’ida members, putting them under virtual house arrest. They were in control. Bin Laden himself considered al-Qa’ida members inside the Islamic Republic to be hostages. The Iranians controlled these al-Qa’ida leaders.
But the U.S. Government didn’t believe that Iran had authorized al-Qa’ida to launch a terrorist attack. But I have to say today that is not the situation.
Indeed, everything changed in 2015 – the same year that the Obama administration and the E3 – France, Germany, and Britain – were in the middle of finalizing the JCPOA.
A sea change was happening within the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis.
Let me give you some information that is brand new to the public today:
Iran decided to allow al-Qa’ida to establish a new operational headquarters, on the condition that al-Qa’ida operatives abide by the regime’s rules governing al-Qa’ida’s stay inside the country. Agency and control.
Since 2015, Iran has also given al-Qa’ida leaders greater freedom of movement inside of Iran under their supervision.
The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC have provided safe havens and logistical support – things like travel documents, ID cards, passports – that enable al-Qa’ida activity.
As a result of this assistance, al-Qa’ida has centralized its leadership inside of Tehran. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s deputies are there today. And, frankly, they’re living a normal al-Qa’ida life.
al-Qa’ida terrorists like Sayf al-Adl and the now-dead Abu Muhammad al-Masri have been able to place a new emphasis on global operations and plotting attacks all across the world.
Tehran has allowed al-Qa’ida to fundraise, to freely communicate with al-Qa’ida members around the world, and to perform many other functions that were previously directed from Afghanistan or Pakistan.
al-Qa’ida now has time. Because they’re inside of Iran, they have access to money. They have a range of Iranian support. They now have new tools for terror.
You now have the world’s state – largest state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the home base for al-Qa’ida.
They are partners in terrorism, partners in hate.
This axis poses a grave threat to the security of nations and to the American homeland itself.
I would say Iran is, indeed, the new Afghanistan – as the key geographic hub for al-Qa’ida – but it’s actually worse.
Unlike in Afghanistan, when al-Qa’ida was hiding in the mountains, al-Qa’ida today is operating underneath the hard shell of the Iranian regime’s protection.
America has far less visibility on al-Qa’ida’s capabilities and their activities than we did on their activities when they were in Tora Bora or even in the mountainous regions of Pakistan.
After 9/11, America was able to unleash our firepower against al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan to the point that we no longer need a large military presence in that country.
Today, we must use our military force surgically against al-Qa’ida operatives in Yemen when necessary.
We don’t have the same options today because these al-Qa’ida thugs are burrowed deep inside of Iran. And if we did have that option, we choose to do that, there’s a much greater risk in executing it.
The Iran-al-Qa’ida axis threatens the progress of the Abraham Accords as well.
If al-Qa’ida can use terror attacks in the region to blackmail nations from joining the warm peace with Israel, then we risk grinding generational momentum for peace in the Middle East to a halt.
We risk limiting the growing number of Mideast nations who will all recognize the threat from Iran.
But most importantly, every country must recognize that this unholy collusion is dramatically increasing the risk of terror attacks against their people.
As Iran permits al-Qa’ida to communicate freely with exponents of hatred abroad, countries like France become even more vulnerable to al-Qa’ida attacks, like the despicable Charlie Hebdo massacre.
As Iran provides al-Qa’ida with travel documents like passports, countries like Germany are ripe to be the site of the re-creation of something like the Hamburg cell, so instrumental in the 9/11 attacks.
As Iran permits al-Qa’ida leaders to travel freely to Syria, one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises will continue to rage on. Impoverished Syrians will keep being lured into becoming jihadists.
If Iran permits al-Qa’ida leaders to send and receive money from al-Shabaab, Western nations risk a terror attack like pre-9/11 Afghanistan, a base, from sprouting up in Somalia. We risk losing control of strategic waterways.
And imagine, too – imagine, too, the destruction that al-Qa’ida could carry out if the Iranian regime decided to devote sizeable state funds in service of al-Qa’ida’s goals.
Imagine the vulnerability we’d have if Iran gave al-Qa’ida access to its satellite networks. This is a terror organization, buried deeply inside a nation-state with advanced capabilities.
Look, there’s ample precedent for all of this if you consider the regime’s support of Hizballah, the Houthis, Shia militias in Iraq, and Sunni terror groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Imagine the threat to America. Imagine the threat to Israel, to Saudi Arabia.
Imagine too the potential to completely upend fragile places with an established al-Qa’ida presence like Libya, Yemen, and the Maghreb, or increase turmoil in places like Bangladesh, where al-Qa’ida cells have carried out attacks.
Imagine that al-Qa’ida starts carrying out attacks at Iran’s behest, even if the control is not perfect. Who is to say that this isn’t the next form of blackmail to pressure countries back into a nuclear deal?
You don’t have to be a former CIA director to see the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis is a massive force for evil all across the world.
But the time is now for America and all free nations to crush the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis. The Trump administration has actually made progress.
Let’s not tolerate Iran giving al-Qa’ida a second wind.
Let’s not downplay the danger of Sunni-Shia cooperation in terror.
Let’s not lie to the American people about Iranian moderation and pretend appeasement will work.
Thirty years of cooperation shows that Iran and al-Qa’ida’s divergent theology is no match for its convergent hatred. That’s the reality.
Here’s reality, too.
Nations have an obligation to sanction entities designated as associated with al-Qa’ida under the UN Security Council Resolution 1267.
We’ve exercised American leadership by sanctioning the MOIS and the IRGC. We urge the United Nations and all countries to do the same.
Today I’ll announce the following actions:
Today we’ll announce sanctions on Iran-based al-Qa’ida leaders Sultan Yusuf Hasan al-Arif and Muhammad Abbatay. He is also known as Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi.
I’m also announcing designations of three leaders of al-Qa’ida Kurdish Battalions, an al-Qa’ida-linked group that operates on the border between Iran and Iraq.
And in a related action, I’m announcing a reward for up to $7 million under the State Department’s Reward for Justice[1] program for information that leads to the location or identification of al-Maghrebi. We want to bring him home to America for justice.
In closing, I want to go back to 1983. It was the fall of my sophomore year at the United States Military Academy.
I remember picking up the newspaper to read that a truck packed with explosives had slammed into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 American warriors.
My life wouldn’t be the same after that. As a young soldier, that attack got me thinking about the big questions of national security, about America’s role in the Middle East and the world.
For those of you who don’t remember, the terrorists who killed our fellow Americans were part of an early incarnation of Hizballah that had the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I’ve not forgotten it.
And after four years leading the CIA and now the State Department, I’m more clear-eyed than ever about the threat from the al-Qa’ida-Iran axis.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has given a new operational headquarters to the terrorist network with more American blood on its hands than any other – people who are plotting fresh atrocities from Tehran even as we speak.
We can’t ignore this truth, and just as we have done with other horrible regimes, like the one in China, the Trump administration will look to this as it is, not as we wish it to be.
We see the true nature of the Iranian regime, and we refuse to indulge it.
We speak the truth about the nature of the Iran-al-Qa’ida relationship, and we’ve taken significant actions to crush it.
We urge every country to do the same for the good of their own people and the good of the security, stability, and prosperity of the world.
The free world’s battle against terrorism will go on. May America always lead in that fight.
Thank you.
May God bless all of you.
And may God bless the United States of America. Thank you. (Applause.)
The Iran-al-Qa’ida Axis
SECRETARY POMPEO: Good morning, everyone.
Thank you, Wang Xiyue, for that very kind introduction and those remarkable words, words that were your own. We’re blessed to have you here today.
Look, as a lot – as you said, a lot of people worked really hard to get you home. America never gives up. We never give in. We never leave anybody behind.
We work, every day and every hour – we will continue to do so – to bring back every American held hostage in Iran, all over – and all over the world back to their families. You simply can’t put America first if you don’t put Americans first.
We have many distinguished guests in the room today. Thank you especially to the ambassadors from different countries, distinguished scholars, and members of the Iranian American community who have joined us.
And thank you to – for the gracious hosting here at the National Press Club.
I know many members of this club do dogged reporting to keep Americans informed on world affairs and that a free press is a staple of a healthy democracy. More speech is important. And I can’t say I always agree with everything that’s written, but what you write is read. And it matters, get it right, get the truth, and America will prosper.
I want to start with a quick story in these remarks today.
Many of you here may recognize the name Abu Muhammad al-Masri, also known as Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah.
He was al-Qa’ida’s worldwide number two, and on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for slaughtering members of our State Department family in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings of 1998. More than 200 people, including 12 Americans, lost their lives in those attacks.
The New York Times reported in November that al-Masri was shot to death on the streets of Tehran.
Today, I can confirm, for the first time, his death on August 7th of last year.
The Times wrote, quote, “That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and al-Qa’ida are bitter enemies,” end of quote.
It could not be more wrong. It wasn’t “surprising” at all. And more importantly, they’re not enemies.
Al-Masri’s presence inside Iran points to the reason that we’re here today. It’s what I want to talk about in these remarks.
al-Qa’ida has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As a result, bin Laden’s wicked creation is poised to gain strength and capabilities.
We ignore this Iran-al-Qa’ida nexus at our own peril.
We need to acknowledge it.
We must confront it.
Indeed, we must defeat it.
Now, I know this news will come as a surprise to many Americans.
We had al-Qa’ida on the ropes after 9/11, thanks to sustained efforts of our brave soldiers, intelligence officers, diplomats, NATO allies, many others who work tirelessly to defend freedom. There are far fewer al-Qa’ida operatives in Afghanistan today than there have been in decades. That remains true.
This is an enormous tribute to American resolve, American ingenuity, American leadership, and frankly, raw American military strength.
That effort drove al-Qa’ida to search for a safer haven, and they found one.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was the perfect choice.
al-Qa’ida has, in fact, carried on a relationship with Tehran for nearly three decades, as the 9/11 Commission clearly established.
In the early ’90s, al-Qa’ida operatives traveled to Iran and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon – the heartland of Hizballah – for explosives training.
In the period before 9/11, the Iranian regime told border inspectors not to stamp al-Qa’ida members’ passports when they entered or left Iran on their way to or from Afghanistan. This was to help them avoid suspicion when they returned to their home countries.
And while there’s no evidence Iran helped plan or had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, at least eight of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran between October of 2000 and February of 2001.
Indeed, in 2011, a federal judge in New York ruled that Iran had provided support for the 9/11 attacks, based on the role it played in furthering al-Qa’ida operatives’ plans.
And of course, after 9/11, hundreds of al-Qa’ida terrorists and their families fleeing America’s righteous vengeance took refuge there inside of Iran.
A letter from bin Laden, found by the Navy SEALS during the Abbottabad raid, sums up the relationship since 9/11 very well:
In his own words, quote, “Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication…There is no need to fight with Iran unless you are forced to,” end of quote. These are bin Laden’s own words about his and al-Qa’ida’s relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course, there’s more evidence as well. In 2013, the Canadian Government disrupted an al-Qa’ida plot against a passenger train that linked Toronto and New York. The Canadian Government stated that the plotters received, quote “direction and guidance,” end of quote, from al-Qa’ida members living inside of Iran. No, New York Times, not a surprise.
Iran arrests students, religious minorities, and environmentalists, but not Jihadist al-Qa’ida killers.
Yet in spite of all the assistance the Khamenei regime provided to al-Qa’ida, Tehran actually imposed tight restrictions on its operatives inside of Iran for some time.
The regime very closely monitored al-Qa’ida members, putting them under virtual house arrest. They were in control. Bin Laden himself considered al-Qa’ida members inside the Islamic Republic to be hostages. The Iranians controlled these al-Qa’ida leaders.
But the U.S. Government didn’t believe that Iran had authorized al-Qa’ida to launch a terrorist attack. But I have to say today that is not the situation.
Indeed, everything changed in 2015 – the same year that the Obama administration and the E3 – France, Germany, and Britain – were in the middle of finalizing the JCPOA.
A sea change was happening within the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis.
Let me give you some information that is brand new to the public today:
Iran decided to allow al-Qa’ida to establish a new operational headquarters, on the condition that al-Qa’ida operatives abide by the regime’s rules governing al-Qa’ida’s stay inside the country. Agency and control.
Since 2015, Iran has also given al-Qa’ida leaders greater freedom of movement inside of Iran under their supervision.
The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC have provided safe havens and logistical support – things like travel documents, ID cards, passports – that enable al-Qa’ida activity.
As a result of this assistance, al-Qa’ida has centralized its leadership inside of Tehran. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s deputies are there today. And, frankly, they’re living a normal al-Qa’ida life.
al-Qa’ida terrorists like Sayf al-Adl and the now-dead Abu Muhammad al-Masri have been able to place a new emphasis on global operations and plotting attacks all across the world.
Tehran has allowed al-Qa’ida to fundraise, to freely communicate with al-Qa’ida members around the world, and to perform many other functions that were previously directed from Afghanistan or Pakistan.
al-Qa’ida now has time. Because they’re inside of Iran, they have access to money. They have a range of Iranian support. They now have new tools for terror.
You now have the world’s state – largest state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the home base for al-Qa’ida.
They are partners in terrorism, partners in hate.
This axis poses a grave threat to the security of nations and to the American homeland itself.
I would say Iran is, indeed, the new Afghanistan – as the key geographic hub for al-Qa’ida – but it’s actually worse.
Unlike in Afghanistan, when al-Qa’ida was hiding in the mountains, al-Qa’ida today is operating underneath the hard shell of the Iranian regime’s protection.
America has far less visibility on al-Qa’ida’s capabilities and their activities than we did on their activities when they were in Tora Bora or even in the mountainous regions of Pakistan.
After 9/11, America was able to unleash our firepower against al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan to the point that we no longer need a large military presence in that country.
Today, we must use our military force surgically against al-Qa’ida operatives in Yemen when necessary.
We don’t have the same options today because these al-Qa’ida thugs are burrowed deep inside of Iran. And if we did have that option, we choose to do that, there’s a much greater risk in executing it.
The Iran-al-Qa’ida axis threatens the progress of the Abraham Accords as well.
If al-Qa’ida can use terror attacks in the region to blackmail nations from joining the warm peace with Israel, then we risk grinding generational momentum for peace in the Middle East to a halt.
We risk limiting the growing number of Mideast nations who will all recognize the threat from Iran.
But most importantly, every country must recognize that this unholy collusion is dramatically increasing the risk of terror attacks against their people.
As Iran permits al-Qa’ida to communicate freely with exponents of hatred abroad, countries like France become even more vulnerable to al-Qa’ida attacks, like the despicable Charlie Hebdo massacre.
As Iran provides al-Qa’ida with travel documents like passports, countries like Germany are ripe to be the site of the re-creation of something like the Hamburg cell, so instrumental in the 9/11 attacks.
As Iran permits al-Qa’ida leaders to travel freely to Syria, one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises will continue to rage on. Impoverished Syrians will keep being lured into becoming jihadists.
If Iran permits al-Qa’ida leaders to send and receive money from al-Shabaab, Western nations risk a terror attack like pre-9/11 Afghanistan, a base, from sprouting up in Somalia. We risk losing control of strategic waterways.
And imagine, too – imagine, too, the destruction that al-Qa’ida could carry out if the Iranian regime decided to devote sizeable state funds in service of al-Qa’ida’s goals.
Imagine the vulnerability we’d have if Iran gave al-Qa’ida access to its satellite networks. This is a terror organization, buried deeply inside a nation-state with advanced capabilities.
Look, there’s ample precedent for all of this if you consider the regime’s support of Hizballah, the Houthis, Shia militias in Iraq, and Sunni terror groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Imagine the threat to America. Imagine the threat to Israel, to Saudi Arabia.
Imagine too the potential to completely upend fragile places with an established al-Qa’ida presence like Libya, Yemen, and the Maghreb, or increase turmoil in places like Bangladesh, where al-Qa’ida cells have carried out attacks.
Imagine that al-Qa’ida starts carrying out attacks at Iran’s behest, even if the control is not perfect. Who is to say that this isn’t the next form of blackmail to pressure countries back into a nuclear deal?
You don’t have to be a former CIA director to see the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis is a massive force for evil all across the world.
But the time is now for America and all free nations to crush the Iran-al-Qa’ida axis. The Trump administration has actually made progress.
Let’s not tolerate Iran giving al-Qa’ida a second wind.
Let’s not downplay the danger of Sunni-Shia cooperation in terror.
Let’s not lie to the American people about Iranian moderation and pretend appeasement will work.
Thirty years of cooperation shows that Iran and al-Qa’ida’s divergent theology is no match for its convergent hatred. That’s the reality.
Here’s reality, too.
Nations have an obligation to sanction entities designated as associated with al-Qa’ida under the UN Security Council Resolution 1267.
We’ve exercised American leadership by sanctioning the MOIS and the IRGC. We urge the United Nations and all countries to do the same.
Today I’ll announce the following actions:
Today we’ll announce sanctions on Iran-based al-Qa’ida leaders Sultan Yusuf Hasan al-Arif and Muhammad Abbatay. He is also known as Abd al-Rahman al-Maghrebi.
I’m also announcing designations of three leaders of al-Qa’ida Kurdish Battalions, an al-Qa’ida-linked group that operates on the border between Iran and Iraq.
And in a related action, I’m announcing a reward for up to $7 million under the State Department’s Reward for Justice[1] program for information that leads to the location or identification of al-Maghrebi. We want to bring him home to America for justice.
In closing, I want to go back to 1983. It was the fall of my sophomore year at the United States Military Academy.
I remember picking up the newspaper to read that a truck packed with explosives had slammed into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 American warriors.
My life wouldn’t be the same after that. As a young soldier, that attack got me thinking about the big questions of national security, about America’s role in the Middle East and the world.
For those of you who don’t remember, the terrorists who killed our fellow Americans were part of an early incarnation of Hizballah that had the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I’ve not forgotten it.
And after four years leading the CIA and now the State Department, I’m more clear-eyed than ever about the threat from the al-Qa’ida-Iran axis.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has given a new operational headquarters to the terrorist network with more American blood on its hands than any other – people who are plotting fresh atrocities from Tehran even as we speak.
We can’t ignore this truth, and just as we have done with other horrible regimes, like the one in China, the Trump administration will look to this as it is, not as we wish it to be.
We see the true nature of the Iranian regime, and we refuse to indulge it.
We speak the truth about the nature of the Iran-al-Qa’ida relationship, and we’ve taken significant actions to crush it.
We urge every country to do the same for the good of their own people and the good of the security, stability, and prosperity of the world.
The free world’s battle against terrorism will go on. May America always lead in that fight.
Thank you.
May God bless all of you.
And may God bless the United States of America. Thank you. (Applause.)
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Al-Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself—With Iran's Help
Al-Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself—With Iran's Help
Interviews with al-Qaeda members and bin Laden’s family reveal a pact that allowed the group to prepare for its next phase.
Adrian Levy Cathy Scott-Clark
November 11, 2017
Tora Bora Caves in Afghanistan on December 2001.Author Archive
The last Islamic State redoubts have been falling in quick succession in recent weeks, with the U.S.-backed coalition taking the caliphate’s self-declared capital of Raqqa last month, and then Syrian forces reclaiming the strategic oil city of Deir al-Zour. But while the group’s experiment in a statehood built on rape, slavery, and execution nears its end, an older terror front has been quietly reconstituting itself. Against all odds, and despite the most costly counter-terrorism campaign ever waged by the West, al-Qaeda has flourished—its comeback assisted by a remarkable pact with Iran.
President Trump recently pointed to this relationship to justify de-certifying the Iran nuclear deal. Facing overwhelming European opposition to that move, CIA director Mike Pompeo suggested the al-Qaeda-Iran pact had been an “open secret” during the Obama administration, which had failed to act. Then last week, the CIA declassified a new trove of documents from the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This document dump, which will take years to sort through and analyze, appeared to confirm the relationship—detailing among other things how Hamza, Osama bin Laden’s son, sheltered in Iran and even got married there; and how, according to one 19-page document, negotiations between al-Qaeda and the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran touched on funding and arming the Sunni terror outfit so it could strike at American targets.
In the days since, several commentators, including in these pages, have dismissed these purported connections as exaggerated, pushed by the White House and its allies to justify the administration’s hostile posture toward Iran. But important new evidence, including interviews with senior al-Qaeda members and Osama bin Laden’s family, gathered by the authors over the past five years, tells a surprising history of the post-9/11 epoch, and it’s one that severely undercuts the conventional view.
Our research reveals that al-Qaeda and covert agents acting for the Iranian deep state first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades back, after Saddam Hussein flat-out rejected al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. The pact then flourished under the George W. Bush administration, when a back-channel from the White House to Tehran, running from 2001 to 2003, discussed it frequently. Former State Department and White House officials in on these talks maintain that the vice president’s office suggested the White House do nothing, worrying that the administration would undermine the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—which was being underwritten by claims he sponsored al-Qaeda and concealed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, according to these same sources, the vice president’s office also told U.S. envoys working on Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next.
A starting point for al-Qaeda’s struggle to mend itself after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan came on November 12, 2001, when Osama bin Laden decided to head to his cave complex in Tora Bora. According to family members, bin Laden told his wives at the farewell that he wanted a different life for the children. “Please discourage them from joining this jihad,” he told his third wife Seham, a Saudi schoolteacher, in a conversation some of his children overheard and described to us. As bin Laden took off for the caves, and most of his family was smuggled into Pakistan, one of al-Qaeda’s most important officials headed for Iran. On December 19, 2001, Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania, boarded a bus in Quetta, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, heading for Taftan, the official border crossing into Iran. He told the story to us over many lengthy meetings, explaining how he travelled on counterfeit documents as “Dr. Abdullah,” a “medic, treating refugees from the Afghan war,” carrying a suitcase filled with U.S. dollars, in a bus with a wanted poster for bin Laden pasted to the windscreen.
At Osama bin Laden’s side for a decade prior to 2001, Mahfouz had become a pivotal figure on al-Qaeda’s leadership council and the head of its sharia (legal) committee. When he began his journey to Taftan, he was on the UN Security Council’s sanctions list, and was wanted by the FBI for questioning about his involvement in managing the logistics for the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa. The CIA had raided his home in Sudan in 1998, investigating the Mauritanian’s role in counterfeiting and money laundering, as well as his attempt to consolidate bin Laden’s assets in Khartoum to send to Afghanistan. He had fled only moments before the raid, and he’d been on the run ever since. Mahfouz hoped, as his bus headed for the Iranian border, to persuade Iranian agents to offer a more permanent sanctuary to al-Qaeda’s leaders and bin Laden’s family.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, aka Abu Hafs al Mauritania, at home in Nouakchott, in 2015
(Cathy Scott-Clark).
Geography, politics, and history lay behind a seemingly bizarre decision by an outlawed Sunni outfit to attempt to partner with a recalcitrant Shia power. Iran shared a common border with Baluchistan in Pakistan, close to where many fighters and bin Laden family members were hiding. Mahfouz had also been to the Persian Gulf before, sent there by bin Laden in 1995 to win military support for al-Qaeda. Mahfouz had first visited Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had rejected his request; however, in Iran, the Quds Force—a covert unit within the Revolutionary Guards responsible for clandestine foreign policy—was open to it, by Mahfouz’s account. On the table was an offer of advanced military training, with al-Qaeda fighters invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. Trainers there were researching how to manufacture “shaped charges”—powerful IEDs that could pierce armor plating, and would later cause havoc among U.S. forces in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself—With Iran's Help
Interviews with al-Qaeda members and bin Laden’s family reveal a pact that allowed the group to prepare for its next phase.
Adrian Levy Cathy Scott-Clark
November 11, 2017
Tora Bora Caves in Afghanistan on December 2001.Author Archive
The last Islamic State redoubts have been falling in quick succession in recent weeks, with the U.S.-backed coalition taking the caliphate’s self-declared capital of Raqqa last month, and then Syrian forces reclaiming the strategic oil city of Deir al-Zour. But while the group’s experiment in a statehood built on rape, slavery, and execution nears its end, an older terror front has been quietly reconstituting itself. Against all odds, and despite the most costly counter-terrorism campaign ever waged by the West, al-Qaeda has flourished—its comeback assisted by a remarkable pact with Iran.
President Trump recently pointed to this relationship to justify de-certifying the Iran nuclear deal. Facing overwhelming European opposition to that move, CIA director Mike Pompeo suggested the al-Qaeda-Iran pact had been an “open secret” during the Obama administration, which had failed to act. Then last week, the CIA declassified a new trove of documents from the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This document dump, which will take years to sort through and analyze, appeared to confirm the relationship—detailing among other things how Hamza, Osama bin Laden’s son, sheltered in Iran and even got married there; and how, according to one 19-page document, negotiations between al-Qaeda and the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran touched on funding and arming the Sunni terror outfit so it could strike at American targets.
In the days since, several commentators, including in these pages, have dismissed these purported connections as exaggerated, pushed by the White House and its allies to justify the administration’s hostile posture toward Iran. But important new evidence, including interviews with senior al-Qaeda members and Osama bin Laden’s family, gathered by the authors over the past five years, tells a surprising history of the post-9/11 epoch, and it’s one that severely undercuts the conventional view.
Our research reveals that al-Qaeda and covert agents acting for the Iranian deep state first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades back, after Saddam Hussein flat-out rejected al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. The pact then flourished under the George W. Bush administration, when a back-channel from the White House to Tehran, running from 2001 to 2003, discussed it frequently. Former State Department and White House officials in on these talks maintain that the vice president’s office suggested the White House do nothing, worrying that the administration would undermine the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—which was being underwritten by claims he sponsored al-Qaeda and concealed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, according to these same sources, the vice president’s office also told U.S. envoys working on Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next.
A starting point for al-Qaeda’s struggle to mend itself after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan came on November 12, 2001, when Osama bin Laden decided to head to his cave complex in Tora Bora. According to family members, bin Laden told his wives at the farewell that he wanted a different life for the children. “Please discourage them from joining this jihad,” he told his third wife Seham, a Saudi schoolteacher, in a conversation some of his children overheard and described to us. As bin Laden took off for the caves, and most of his family was smuggled into Pakistan, one of al-Qaeda’s most important officials headed for Iran. On December 19, 2001, Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, a whip-thin Islamic scholar from Mauritania, boarded a bus in Quetta, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, heading for Taftan, the official border crossing into Iran. He told the story to us over many lengthy meetings, explaining how he travelled on counterfeit documents as “Dr. Abdullah,” a “medic, treating refugees from the Afghan war,” carrying a suitcase filled with U.S. dollars, in a bus with a wanted poster for bin Laden pasted to the windscreen.
At Osama bin Laden’s side for a decade prior to 2001, Mahfouz had become a pivotal figure on al-Qaeda’s leadership council and the head of its sharia (legal) committee. When he began his journey to Taftan, he was on the UN Security Council’s sanctions list, and was wanted by the FBI for questioning about his involvement in managing the logistics for the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa. The CIA had raided his home in Sudan in 1998, investigating the Mauritanian’s role in counterfeiting and money laundering, as well as his attempt to consolidate bin Laden’s assets in Khartoum to send to Afghanistan. He had fled only moments before the raid, and he’d been on the run ever since. Mahfouz hoped, as his bus headed for the Iranian border, to persuade Iranian agents to offer a more permanent sanctuary to al-Qaeda’s leaders and bin Laden’s family.
Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, aka Abu Hafs al Mauritania, at home in Nouakchott, in 2015
(Cathy Scott-Clark).
Geography, politics, and history lay behind a seemingly bizarre decision by an outlawed Sunni outfit to attempt to partner with a recalcitrant Shia power. Iran shared a common border with Baluchistan in Pakistan, close to where many fighters and bin Laden family members were hiding. Mahfouz had also been to the Persian Gulf before, sent there by bin Laden in 1995 to win military support for al-Qaeda. Mahfouz had first visited Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had rejected his request; however, in Iran, the Quds Force—a covert unit within the Revolutionary Guards responsible for clandestine foreign policy—was open to it, by Mahfouz’s account. On the table was an offer of advanced military training, with al-Qaeda fighters invited in 1995 to attend a camp run by Hezbollah and sponsored by the Iranian Quds force in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. Trainers there were researching how to manufacture “shaped charges”—powerful IEDs that could pierce armor plating, and would later cause havoc among U.S. forces in Iraq.