In the middle of a long and fascinating piece on his regrets about the Iraq War, former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, now with the Atlantic Monthly, discusses the new Institute for Defense Analyses report on Iraq and Terrorism. Unlike, virtually every other reporter, he appears to have read it. "Before the war," he writes, "I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorist groups."
The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis.
As he indicates, Goldberg is not new to the subject. (It's telling that those who have written about Saddam Hussein's support for jihadist terror are encouraging people to read the actual report for themselves.) Before the war, he wrote two articles about Iraq and terrorism and the IDA study confirms several elements of his reporting.
In the first, Goldberg wrote that he learned about one al Qaeda connection “"while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad.”"
His name was Qassem Hussein Mohammed. He told Goldberg “that his involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.”
When Goldberg first reported this it drew skepticism from intelligence officials who had long believed that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would not work with Islamic radicals like Zawahiri, now Osama bin LadenÂ’s chief deputy. We now know from a captured Iraqi regime document dated March 18, 1993, that ZawahiriÂ’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad had been receiving support from Saddam for at least two years.
According to the study’s authors: “Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda -- such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri -- or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.”
Goldberg also reported extensively on the links between SaddamÂ’s regime and al Qaeda affiliates in Kurdistan.
Kurdish culture, he wrote:
has traditionally been immune to religious extremism. According to Kurdish officials, Ansar al-Islam grew out of an idea spread by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Osama bin Laden's deputy in Al Qaeda. "There are two schools of thought" in Al Qaeda, Karim Sinjari, the Interior Minister of Kurdistan's Democratic Party-controlled region, told me. "Osama bin Laden believes that the infidels should be beaten in the head, meaning the United States. Zawahiri's philosophy is that you should fight the infidel even in the smallest village, that you should try to form Islamic armies everywhere. The Kurdish fundamentalists were influenced by Zawahiri."
Kurds were among those who travelled to Afghanistan from all over the Muslim world, first to fight the Soviets, in the early nineteen-eighties, then to join Al Qaeda. The members of the groups that eventually became Ansar al-Islam spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan, according to Kurdish intelligence officials. One Kurd who went to Afghanistan was Mala Krekar, an early leader of the Islamist movement in Kurdistan; according to Sinjari, he now holds the title of "emir" of Ansar al-Islam.
In 1998, the first force of Islamist terrorists crossed the Iranian border into Kurdistan, and immediately tried to seize the town of Haj Omran. Kurdish officials said that the terrorists were helped by Iran, which also has an interest in undermining a secular Muslim government. "The terrorists blocked the road, they killed Kurdish Democratic Party cadres, they threatened the villagers," Sinjari said. "We fought them and they fled."
Among the Islamists in Kurdistan at the time was a fledgling terrorist outfit known as the Islamic Resistance Organization (TK) of Kurdistan. The Iraqi regime moved quickly to develop a relationship with a group that could undermine the strength of the two Kurdish parties in northern Iraq. According to a captured document, the Iraqi regime began to provide "“financial and moral”" support to individual members of the group and decided it would seek a more formal relationship if the group increased in number and strength. Members of the IRO would later join with other jihadists to form Ansar al Islam in early September 2001 and would play host to hundreds of al Qaeda fighters fleeing the battle in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein supported them.
Two additional notes. In February 5, 2003, ABC News ran a critique of Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations and included an interview with Mullah Krekar, mentioned as the emir of Ansar al Islam in Goldberg's original report. The ABC story took Krekar at his word when he disclaimed any cooperation with Saddam Hussein and even said he wanted to overthrow the Iraqi regime. But then he made a mistake.
Krekar was asked about Abu Wael, the man Goldberg reported was a senior Iraqi Intelligence official. "I know Abu Wael for 25 years," Krekar said. "And he is in Baghdad. And he is an Arabic member of our shura, our leadership council also." That part of the interview, reflected in a transcript, never made air. The interview took place in early 2003 -- just months before the invasion. Why was Abu Wael in Baghdad?
A detained Ansar al Islam terrorist named Rebwar Mohammed Abdul told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that he had heard about Abu Wael directly from Mullah Krekar. Abdul denied any personal knowledge of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, but added an interesting detail. "I never talked to Wael but I saw him three times in meetings with Mullah Krekar. The mullah told us that Wael was a friend of his for 23 years and that they had met in Baghdad while Wael was an intelligence officer."
Consider the evidence. Abu Wael was in Baghdad six weeks before the Iraq war began. The spiritual leader of Ansar al Islam has apparently admitted that Abu Wael was an officer in Iraqi intelligence. Numerous individuals with firsthand knowledge of the Iraq-Ansar relationship have independently reported that Abu Wael works for both the Islamist group and Iraqi intelligence. And we have intercepts of Iraqi Intelligence officials offering support to Ansar al Islam.
Perhaps it was with this evidence in mind that Le Monde, in a separate article on June 27, 2005, wrote (without attribution) that Ansar al Islam "was founded in 2001 with the joint help of Saddam Hussein--who intended to use it against moderate Kurds--and Al-Qaeda, which hoped to find in Kurdistan a new location that would receive its members."
