Mr. TROFIMOV: Now, at the time, nobody knew about the existence of this Sunni jihadi fundamentalist ideology that later evolved into what is known today as al-Qaida. In fact, the assumption in Washington at the time was that the Shiites, the Iranian Shiites, had taken over the mosque and is also part of the Iranian revolutionary expansion to the rest of the Muslim world. INSKEEP: After your exhaustive investigation of this, you concluded the real culprits were Sunni Muslim fundamentalists. And can you draw a fairly straight line from those Sunni Muslim fundamentalists to the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who form the leadership of al-Qaida today? Mr. TROFIMOV: There is a very direct connection. First of all, this was the first time that the two components of al-Qaida today - the Wahabi zealots from Saudi Arabia and the jihadi extremists, the outgrowth of the Islam Brotherhood in Egypt - have come together. Just as today's al-Qaida is lead by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, a veteran of the jihadist groups there, so was this movement in Mecca. The senior leaders there were Egyptians.
You are missing the point. The issue is what is the seminal event that has led to Islamic terrorism throughout the world. I posit that it has been the Iranian Revolution.
When I arrived in Tehran in 1977, Iran was a solid US ally. There were over 70,000 Americans in Tehran. You could buy Playboy off the newsstands. Women were in Western dress. There were over 50,000 Iranians studying in the US, the largest of any country. There was a permanent official Israeli trade mission in Tehran. Iranian relations with Israel and the Saudis were excellent.
The Iranian Revolution reversed it all and literally on the arrival of Khomeini in the country in early February 1979. I left on March 31, 1979. It was a different country overnight. The women all were in chadors. The armed mujaheddin roamed the streets. And on Feb 14, 1979 our embassy was overrun and occupied for over three months, which included looting and harassment.
Khomeini provided money, training, and arms to both Hizballah (Shi'a) and Hamas (Sunni). Iran continues to do so along with assisting Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza.
Iran views Syria as a crucial causeway in its weapons supply route to Lebanese Hizballah, its primary beneficiary, and as a key pillar in its “resistance” front. In 2014, Iran continued to provide arms, financing, training, and the facilitation of primarily Iraqi Shia and Afghan fighters to support the Asad regime’s brutal crackdown that has resulted in the deaths of at least 191,000 people in Syria, according to August UN estimates. Iran publicly admits to sending members of the IRGC to Syria in an advisory role. There is consistent media reporting that some of these troops are IRGC-QF members and that they have taken part in direct combat operations.
The bottom line is that Iran remains the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and it really matters not if they are Shi'a or Sunni.
Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody. Iran previously allowed AQ facilitators to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran since at least 2009, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and Syria.
The U.S. indictment of bin Laden filed in 1998 stated that al-Qaeda "forged alliances . . . with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies." On May 31, 2001, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "Officials of the Iranian government helped arrange advanced weapons and explosives training for Al-Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings."
The 9/11 Commission Report stated that 8 to 10 of the hijackers on 9/11 passed through Iran and their travel was facilitated by Iranian border guards. The report also noted that "a senior operative of Hezbollah" (Imad Mughniyah) was on the flights that convoyed the future hijackers from Saudi Arabia to Tehran, along with associates that Kenneth Timmerman describes as "Iranian agents". The extent of Iranian involvement has been questioned due to major differences between the religious ideologies of Iran and al Qaeda; according to the 9/11 Commission report, Mughniyah's presence on flights carrying the hijackers to Iran may have been a "remarkable coincidence." After the commission called for "further investigation" into a possible Iranian role in the attacks, President George W. Bush demanded that Iran sever its ties with al-Qaeda, while saying that in his view, "There was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of September 11.
In February 2014, the US Treasury Department stated that Iran was helping al Qaeda transfer fighters into Syria, with key smuggler Olimzhon Adkhamovich Sadikov providing "visas and passports to numerous foreign fighters."
In March 2015, a US federal judge found Iran, along with Sudan, complicit in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole by AQ, stating, "Iran was directly involved in establishing Al-Qaeda’s Yemen network and supported training and logistics for Al-Qaeda in the Gulf region", and that “Iran used Lebanese Hizballah . . . as its primary ‘facilitator’ for providing training and communications support."
Until there is regime change in Iran, militant Islamic fundamentalism will continue to increase. Iran is the source of most of it and they precipitated the current division between Sunni and Shi'a. If they get a nuclear weapon, I can assure you that the Saudis will get one as well. They are two scorpions in a bottle each bent on the destruction of the other.