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 to Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next. [...]
There is no evidence that this 1995 pact came to anything. But a door was opened, and on December 20, 2001 when Mahfouz reached the Taftan border crossing and made a dash into Iran, he was greeted on the Iranian side by agents from the Ansar ul-Mahdi Corps, an elite cell within the Quds Force; he eventually won an audience in Tehran with its commander, General Qassem Soleimani. However, Iran was not yet fully committed to cooperating. According to senior U.S officials then working on South Asia and Afghanistan for the State Department and the White House, Iran’s Foreign Ministry, fearful that the U.S. would turn its military attentions to Iran after it finished the invasion of Iraq for which it was then building international support, reached out to the Americans. [...]
Hamza would remain with his father for a little over 12 hours. Bin Laden, spooked, forced him to leave, only for the SEAL team to arrive shortly afterward. A contingent of al-Qaeda’s clerical and military leaders remained in Iran until April 2012, when Mahfouz also slipped away from his Quds Force guard, and eventually flew home to Mauritania. Most of the outfit’s military council, a core group of five led by the Egyptian Saif al Adel, remained in Iran until 2015. Then the Quds Force transported some to Syria to join the fight against the Islamic State. Leading this cell was Abu al-Khayr al-Masri and Abu Mohammed al-Masri—the latter Hamza’s father-in-law, described by the U.S. intelligence community as the “most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.” With them came Jordanian fighters with connections to Zarqar, including one of Zarqawi’s most important deputies—the plan being for this group to contact ISIS fighters and leaders, encouraging a split.
No comments:
Post a Comment