Saddam's Ambassador to al Qaeda

The Weekly Standard ^ | March 1, 2004 | Jonathan Schanzer

[RWR8189]

An Iraqi prisoner details Saddam's links to Osama bin Laden's terror network.

A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al Qaeda.

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

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

My first question to al-Shamari was whether he was involved in the operations of Ansar al Islam. My translator asked him the question in Arabic, and al-Shamari nodded: "Yes." Al-Shamari, who appears to be in his late twenties, said that his division of the Mukhabarat provided weapons to Ansar, "mostly mortar rounds." This statement echoed an independent Kurdish report from July 2002 alleging that ordnance seized from Ansar al Islam was produced by Saddam's military and a Guardian article several weeks later alleging that truckloads of arms were shipped to Ansar from areas controlled by Saddam.

In addition to weapons, al-Shamari said, the Mukhabarat also helped finance Ansar al Islam. "On one occasion we gave them ten million Swiss dinars [$700,000]," al-Shamari said, referring to the pre-1990 Iraqi currency. On other occasions, the Mukhabarat provided more than that. The assistance, he added, was furnished "every month or two months."

I then picked up a picture of a man known as Abu Wael that I had acquired from Kurdish intelligence. In the course of my research, several sources had claimed that Abu Wael was on Saddam's payroll and was also an al Qaeda operative, but few had any facts to back up their claim. For example, one Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, stated flatly before the Iraq war, "all information indicates [that Abu Wael] was the link between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime" but neglected to provide any such information. Agence France-Presse after the war cited a Kurdish security chief's description of Abu Wael as a "key link to Saddam's former Baath regime" and an "intelligence agent for the ousted president originally from Baghdad." Again, nothing was provided to substantiate this claim.

In my own analysis of this group, I could do little but weakly assert that Wael was "reportedly an al Qaeda operative on Saddam's payroll." The best reporting on Wael came from a March 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who had visited a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq and interviewed Ansar prisoners. He spoke with one Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammed, whom Kurdish intelligence captured while he was on his way to the Ansar enclave. Muhammed told Goldberg that Abu Wael was "the actual decision-maker" for Ansar al Islam and "an employee of the Mukhabarat."

"Do you know this man?" I asked al-Shamari. His eyes widened and he smiled. He told me that he knew the man in the picture, but that his graying beard was now completely white. He said that the man was Abu Wael, whose full name is Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani. The prisoner told me that he had worked for Abu Wael, who was the leader of a special intelligence directorate in the Mukhabarat. That directorate provided assistance to Ansar al Islam at the behest of Saddam Hussein, whom Abu Wael had met "four or five times." Al-Shamari added that "Abu Wael's wife is Izzat al-Douri's cousin," making him a part of Saddam's inner circle. Al-Douri, of course, was the deputy chairman of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council, a high-ranking official in Iraq's armed forces, and Saddam's righthand man. Originally number six on the most wanted list, he is still believed to be at large in Iraq, and is suspected of coordinating aspects of insurgency against American troops, primarily in the Sunni triangle.

Why, I asked, would Saddam task one of his intelligence agents to work with the Kurds, an ethnic group that was an avowed enemy of the Baath regime, and had clashed with Iraqi forces on several occasions? Al-Shamari said that Saddam wanted to create chaos in the pro-American Kurdish region. In other words, he used Ansar al Islam as a tool against the Kurds. As an intelligence official for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (one of the two major parties in northern Iraq) explained to me, "Most of the Kurdish fighters in Ansar al Islam didn't know the link to Saddam." They believed they were fighting a local jihad. Only the high-level lieutenants were aware that Abu Wael was involved.

Al-Shamari also told me that the links between Saddam's regime and the al Qaeda network went beyond Ansar al Islam. He explained in considerable detail that Saddam actually ordered Abu Wael to organize foreign fighters from outside Iraq to join Ansar. Al-Shamari estimated that some 150 foreign fighters were imported from al Qaeda clusters in Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon to fight with Ansar al Islam's Kurdish fighters.

I asked him who came from Lebanon. "I don't know the name of the group," he replied. "But the man we worked with was named Abu Aisha." Al-Shamari was likely referring to Bassam Kanj, alias Abu Aisha, who was a little-known militant of the Dinniyeh group, a faction of the Lebanese al Qaeda affiliate Asbat al Ansar. Kanj was killed in a January 2000 battle with Lebanese forces.

Al-Shamari said that there was also contact with the Egyptian "Gamaat al-Jihad," which is now seen as the core of al Qaeda's leadership, as well as with the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which bin Laden helped create in 1998 as an alternative to Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Al-Shamari talked of Abu Wael's links with Turkey's "Jamaa al-Khilafa"--likely the group also known as the "Union of Islamic Communities" (UIC) or the "Organization of Caliphate State." This terror group, established in 1983 by Cemalettin Kaplan, reportedly met with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997, and later sent cadres there to train. Three years before 9/11, UIC plotted to crash a plane into Ankara's Ataturk Mausoleum on a day when hundreds of Turkish officials were present.

Al-Shamari stated that Abu Wael sometimes traveled to meet with these groups. All of them, he added, visited Wael in Iraq and were provided Iraqi visas. This corroborates an interview I had with a senior PUK official in April 2003, who stated that many of the Arab fighters captured or killed during the war held passports with Iraqi visas.

Al-Shamari said that importing foreign fighters to train in Iraq was part of his job in the Mukhabarat. The fighters trained in Salman Pak, a facility located some 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. He said that he had personal knowledge of 500 fighters that came through Salman Pak dating back to the late 1990s; they trained in "urban combat, explosives, and car bombs." This account agrees with a White House Background Paper on Iraq dated September 12, 2002, which cited the "highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations."

Abu Wael also sent money to the aforementioned al Qaeda affiliates, and to other groups that "worked against the United States." Abu Wael dispensed most of the funds himself, al-Shamari said, but there was also some cooperation with Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Zarqawi, as the prisoner explained, was al Qaeda's link to Iraq in the same way that Abu Wael was the Iraqi link to al Qaeda. Indeed, Zarqawi (who received medical attention in Baghdad in 2002 for wounds that he suffered from U.S. forces in Afghanistan) and Abu Wael helped Ansar al Islam prepare for the U.S. assault on its small enclave last year. According to al-Shamari, Ansar was given the plan from the top Iraqi leadership: "If the U.S. was to hit [the Ansar base], the fighters were directed to go to Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul . . . Faluja and other places." This statement agreed with a prior prisoner interview I had with the attempted murderer of Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. This second prisoner told me that "Ansar had plans to go south if the U.S. would attack."

Al-Shamari said the new group was to be named Jund ash-Sham, and would deal mainly in explosives. He believed that Zarqawi and Abu Wael were responsible for some of the attacks against U.S. soldiers in central Iraq. "Their directives were to hit America and American interests," he said.

Al-Shamari claimed to have had prior information about al Qaeda attacks in the past. "I knew about the attack on the American in Jordan," he said, referring to the November 2002 assassination of USAID official Lawrence Foley. "Zarqawi," he said, "ordered that man to be killed."

These are some of the highlights from my interview, which lasted about 45 minutes.

I heard one other salient Abu Wael anecdote in an earlier interview during my eight-day trip to Iraq. That interview was with the former tenth-in-command for Ansar al Islam, a man known simply as Qods. In June 2003, just before he was arrested and put in the jail where I met him, Qods said that he saw Abu Wael. After the war, Abu Wael dispatched him from an Ansar safe house in Ravansar, Iran, to deliver a message to his son in Baghdad. The message: Ansar al Islam leaders needed help getting back into Iraq. It was only then, he said, when he met Abu Wael's son, that he learned of the link between the Baathists and al Qaeda.

Qods told me that he was angry with the leaders of Ansar for hiding its ties to Saddam. "Ansar had lots of secret ties between the Baath and Arab leaders," he said.

The challenge now is to document the claims of these witnesses about the secret ties between Saddam, al Qaeda, and Abu Wael. A number of U.S. officials have indicated to me that there are other Iraqis who have similar stories to tell. Perhaps they can corroborate Abdul Rahman al-Shamari's account. Meanwhile, the U.S. deck of cards representing Iraq's 55 most wanted appears to be one card short. Colonel Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani, aka Abu Wael, should be number 56.

Jonathan Schanzer is a terrorism analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of the forthcoming book "Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliates and the Next Generation of Terror."

[marron]

I agree with you, Al Ansar looks Iranian to me, or at least Iran tolerates it.

There are a lot of these anomalies. Iran backed the Northern Alliance, almost went to war against the Talibs, but have allowed some of Osama's inner circle to find refuge, and allowed escaping Al Qaeda to cross its territory. It looks like Chechens were allowed to cross Iran to get to Afghanistan for training, before.

Saddam would have backed Al Ansar as a theat to the other Kurdish factions, although had he ever regained control of the region they would probably have been the first up against the wall...

[kristinn]

Morning bump. Thanks for posting this informative article.

[JohnGalt]

Tin foil apologia from a traitorous magazine.

[MeekOneGOP]

Thanks for the ping ! ...

A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al Qaeda.

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

[DAPFE8900]

That is what i been saying GW should be out saying..."We have the enemy coming in droves to Iraq to fight them there and not fight them in our sky or on our soil."
If he did that he would get instant bump from american security moms.

[DoctorMichael]

Bump for later reading.

[JohnGalt]

Jonathan Schanzer is a Soref fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Washinton Institute is known to support the MEK, which is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States State Department.

[Stellar Dendrite]

bump

[NeoCaveman]

you know it and I know it, but why the hell the adminstration doesn't push the AQ links is beyond me.

[aculeus]

Bump.

[ohioWfan]

He HAS said that.

We are taking the fight to the enemy, to prevent their bringing it here.

[FBD]

The evidence is steadily mounting terrorist links to Saddam. One must look at all the evidence to come to an honest conclusion. Just because you don’t like the source, or it doesn’t line up with your personal beliefs, doesn’t change the evidence. If the Weekly Standard had a story about the lack of WMD’s in Iraq, then you would probably be the first to praise them. That’s not very intellectually honest.

From your link to Daniel Pipes article:

---

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/clawson/clawson052003.htm

…“The MEK is not your typical anti-Western group, but an organization with a strong political presence in Western capitals and over 3,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq, singularly dedicated to one goal: overthrowing its "archenemy," the Islamic Republic of Iran. Of course, during its 17 years in Iraq, it also had to do Saddam Hussein's bidding. This situation raises several questions:

• Is the MEK a terrorist group? No. It used terrorism decades ago, when its members attacked Americans. For the last 15 years, however, the MEK has been organized as an army, and its only violent actions have been directed against the Iranian regime.

Unlike Hezbollah (which targets Jewish community centers and shoots rockets into civilian areas), the MEK attacks specific regime targets. Unlike the PLO (whose leaders were terrorists more recently and arguably still are), the MEK really has foresworn this barbaric tactic.

• Can the MEK liberate Iran? No. Its strategy of invasion by an army can't work. The foul theocracy in Tehran will come to an end when the democratic forces in Iran finally manage to push it aside. Foreigners can best help them by encouraging satellite-television transmissions from Iranians living in free countries (as U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback has recently proposed).

• Can the MEK be useful? Yes. Western spy agencies are short on "human intelligence" -- meaning spies on the ground in Iran, as distinct from eyes in the sky. Coalition military commanders should seek out the MEK for information on the Iranian mullahs' agents in Iraq.

The MEK can also supply key information on developments in Iran -- where, despite a tendency toward exaggeration, it has had some major scoops. Its information in mid-2002 about Iran's nuclear program, for example, was better than what the International Atomic Energy Agency knew, thereby leading a shocked U.S. government to kick off an investigation that confirmed just how far advanced the Iranians are toward building a nuclear bomb.

Policy toward the MEK has long been quietly but intensely and bitterly debated in Washington. To curry favor with Iranian "moderates," the State Department in 1997 designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Although 150 members of Congress publicly opposed this designation, a U.S. court of appeals recently upheld it.

This stark difference of views helps explain Washington's erratic policies of late. On April 15, the U.S. Army signed a cease-fire permitting the MEK to keep its weapons and use them against Iranian regime infiltrators into Iraq. This deal infuriated the State Department, which then convinced the president to undo it, leading to the strange sight of U.S. troops surrounding MEK camps on May 9, disarming its fighters and taking up positions to protect them.

That's a bad idea. Coalition forces are urgently needed to restore order elsewhere in Iraq. And State is dreaming if it thinks the sight of U.S. troops guarding the MEK will mollify Iran's mullahs.

Instead, as the U.S. Army recommends, MEK members should (after giving assurances not to attack Iranian territory) be permitted enough arms to protect themselves from their Iranian opponents. And in November, when the secretary of state next decides whether or not to re-certify the MEK as a terrorist group, he should come to the sensible conclusion that it poses no threat to the security of the United States or its citizens, and remove it from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Finally, because Iran's mullahs irrationally fear the MEK (as shown by their 1988 massacre in the jails of Iran of 10,000 long-imprisoned MEK members and supporters), maintaining the MEK as an organized group in separate camps in Iraq offers an excellent way to intimidate and gain leverage over Tehran.

To deter the mullahs from taking hostile steps (supporting terrorism against coalition troops in Iraq, building nuclear weapons), it could prove highly effective to threaten U.S. meetings with the MEK or providing help for its anti-regime publicity campaign."

[billbears]

Wishful thinking from neocon central.

The 9/11 congressional inquiry in the most comprehensive inquiry to date into the attacks makes no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, except for a passing reference in the testimony of CIA director George Tenet to the possibility that hijacker Mohammed Atta may or may not have met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. Czech authorities had originally alerted the U.S. to such a possibility, but later withdrew the claim, which was always doubted by FBI officials who had information placing Atta in the U.S. on each of the days either side of the purported Prague encounter. Claims of an Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent were never considered sufficiently strong to include either in President Bush's State of the Union address or in Secretary of State Powell's UN testimony. And U.S. authorities are now in a position to definitively answer the question of just who the Iraqi agent met that day in Prague, since he's recently been detained in Iraq. But the claim of Iraqi involvement in the attack or with the organization responsible simply does not feature in the report.

How Close Were Iraq and Al-Qaeda?

[FBD]

Jonathan Schanzer

---

Jonathan Schanzer is a Soref fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in radical Islamic movements. Mr. Schanzer holds a bachelor's degree in international relations from Emory University and a master's degree in Middle East studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he wrote his master's thesis on the modern history of militant Islam. More recently he studied at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo.

Prior to joining the Institute, Mr. Schanzer was a research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He was also a research assistant at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Jerusalem, a journalist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, an associate producer for Cable News Network, and an information officer at the Consulate General of Israel in Atlanta.

Mr. Schanzer has published Middle East-related work in the Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Jerusalem Post, and Investors Business Daily. He has also appeared on CNN, al-Jazeera, and the Fox News Channel as a Middle East expert.

Mr. Schanzer is currently working on a study entitled Al-Qaeda's Affiliates: Exploiting Weak Central Authority in the Arab World.

Mr. Schanzer has traveled extensively in Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, the Palestinian territories, and Israel. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew.

Published articles include:

"Al-Qaeda," "Osama Bin Laden," and "Militant Islam," Encyclopedia of Terrorism (Harvey W. Kushner, ed), Sage Publications (2003)

"What the War Means . . . for the Middle East," Doublethink Journal (Winter 2003)

"The Challenge of Hamas to Fatah," Middle East Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 2003)

"A Gaza-West Bank Split? Why the Palestinian Territories Might Become Two Separate States," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 7 (July 2001)

"At War with Whom? A Short History of Militant Islam," Doublethink Journal (Spring 2002)

"Palestinian Uprisings Compared," Middle East Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3 (Summer 2002)

[FBD]

I'll say the same thing to you, as I said to John Galt:

"The evidence is steadily mounting terrorist links to Saddam. One must look at all the evidence to come to an honest conclusion.

Just because you don’t like the source, or it doesn’t line up with your personal beliefs, doesn’t change the evidence.

If the Weekly Standard had a story about the lack of WMD’s in Iraq, then you would probably be the first to praise them. That’s not very intellectually honest."

Regards

[billbears]

If the Weekly Standard had a story about the lack of WMD’s in Iraq, then you would probably be the first to praise them

But the fact is they won't. Not until the neocons are tired of using the Republican party for their best interests. The evidence is not mounting. What the evidence, contrary to the Weekly Standard and 24 hours of Fox News, shows is that Al Qaeda is entering into Iraq after the fall of Hussein and that Hussein did not want his troops to work with the Islamic crazies. Fox News even stated that back when he was caught in some released letter IIRC.

An honest conclusion would accept that David Kay is not a turncoat and that the WMDs were destroyed, are no longer there, and probably weren't there in the levels we were told in the first place. A partisan answer would believe that against mounting evidence that WMDs can't be found they must still be there or shipped off to Syria or Iran

[roses of sharon]

Saddam and Sons's defense team is on board.

Never forget the real evil is Bush/Cheney/and their Jewish cabal.

Saddam and Sons would never, ever, ever, ever, for the last 25 years associate themselves with AQ, remember Saddam and Sons were saintly secularists.

Which means that Islamic suicide cults, who's goal it is to kill Americans, Christians, Jews, damage US and Israeli cities and financial markets, were completely out of step with Saddam and Sons.

For they only wanted peace, and to be left alone.

[hoosiermama]

Did you see this?

BUMP

[TheErnFormerlyKnownAsBig]

It' way too long for the thumbsucking CBS crowd and too complicated with all those strange names.

It doesn't have that sing song sound like John Kerry's voice and it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as smoothly as "Bush Lied!"

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Thanks for the ping, hoosiermama.

I tend to stay away from the FR discussions.

I'm not sure I want to know my fellow Americans who still think we should have left the monster Saddam (pal of Al Qaeda, torturer of babies, financier of suicide bombers, evildoer) in power.

8 TEXT FROM INTERCEPTED LETTER WRITTEN BY SUSPECTED TERRORIST LEADER ABU MUS’AB AL-ZARQAWI ~ CENTCOM | 2/19/04 | sore loser