The U.S. Treasury Department dropped a bombshell today when it sanctioned four al Qaeda operatives known to be operating in Iran. Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad along with Mustafa Hamid, Muhammad Rab'a al Sayid al Bahtiti, and Ali Saleh Husain have been designated as terrorists under Executive Order 13224. All four men serve on al Qaeda's Shura Majlis, or executive council. Mustafa Hamid's dealings with Iran, which the Treasury provides great detail, are especially interesting.
A senior U.S. military intelligence official who tracks al Qaeda told me that Hamid is both "al Qaeda's emir of Iran" and "al Qaeda's ambassador to Iran." Here is how the Treasury described Hamid:
While living in Iran, Hamid was harbored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which served as Hamid's point of contact for communications between al Qaeda and Iran...
In the mid-1990s, Mustafa Hamid reportedly negotiated a secret relationship between Osama Bin Laden and Iran, allowing many al Qaeda members safe transit through Iran to Afghanistan.
In the late 1990s, Mustafa Hamid passed communications between Osama bin Laden and the Government of Iran. When tensions were high between Iran and Afghanistan, Mustafa Hamid traveled multiple times from Kandahar to Tehran as an intermediary for the Taliban.
In late 2001, Mustafa Hamid was in Tehran delivering messages from the Taliban to the Government of Iran. Hamid also negotiated on behalf of al Qaeda in an attempt to relocate al Qaeda families to Iran. As part of this effort, senior al Qaeda member Abu Hafs the Mauritanian traveled with Hamid and two IRGC members to Tehran for meetings. Beginning in late 2001, the family of a senior al Qaeda military commander lived with Mustafa Hamid's family in Iran. Separately, in 2002 Mustafa Hamid facilitated contacts between the IRGC and another senior al Qaeda military commander. In mid-2003, Mustafa Hamid was arrested in Iran along with other al Qaeda members and associates.
The "arrests" were made after the 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were directly traced back to al Qaeda's network in Iran (Sa'ad was involved the planning of this attack.) But the arrests were merely window dressing, as noted here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD back in 2005. Incidentally, in June 2008, the Treasury confirmed this when it sanctioned three al Qaeda financiers who operated from Iran and moved freely throughout the Middle East and South Asia well after 2003.
Not only has the Treasury linked Iran to al Qaeda, but it has linked the group to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Back in October 2007, the Treasury sanctioned the Qods Force, the special operations branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for providing "material support to the Taliban, Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC)." Hamas and Islamic Jihad are also Sunni terror groups.
We're constantly told that Shia Iran and Sunni al Qaeda would and could never cooperate due to the ideological differences between the two sects. But the Treasury, whose information is valuable in understanding al Qaeda's global network, shows this is patently false.
