Still More Journalistic Sanity on Iraq and al Qaeda

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."