The recently released Pentagon-funded study that failed to find a direct, operational link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda, found among other things that Saddam had established support for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri who later merged his group with al Qaeda. So says the Washington Times this morning.
Perhaps the IDA report's most significant new disclosure is that the Iraqi Intelligence Service, known as the Mukhabarat, established an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). A captured 1993 memo from the IIS to Saddam said that Iraq had aided the group previously and was restarting contacts to help with attacks on the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.
EIJ was founded by Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon who, along with other members, sought to overthrow the secular Egyptian government. After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was arrested but served jail time only for illegal arms possession. He met bin Laden in Afghanistan while with the mujahedeen resistance fighting the Soviets. He returned to Egypt in 1990 and, in 1998, merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al Qaeda.
The connection to al Qaeda is not direct, but through the Egyptian Islamic Jihad it is a connection nonetheless. For a direct, operational connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and a terrorist organization the study identifies Hamas.
Before the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration made an issue of Saddam's offer to provide money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as proof of Baghdad's support for international terrorism. The IDA report reveals that Saddam provided much more significant aid to groups such as Hamas, a terror group backed by Iran and now in control of the Gaza Strip.
A 2002 annual report by the IIS' M8 division told of providing millions of dollars and arms to Palestinian terror groups and training Palestinians in Iraqi camps. The IIS maintained representatives in the Palestinian territories who met with Hamas leaders, such as founder Ahmad Yassin, who conveyed their needs to Baghdad.
In 2002, Baghdad hosted 13 conferences of various Islamic groups, according to the M8 report, which also told of scores of messages from these groups seeking money and arms.
Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front, found safe haven in Iraq in the late 1980s. He became a wanted man after he engineered the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro during which American Leon Klinghoffer was shot and pushed overboard in his wheelchair.
According to the Times the report, including copies of the captured IIS documents, is being mailed by U.S. Joint Forces Command to journalists and media outlets in an effort to provide them with a detailed picture of Iraq's support of terrorism.
So far it doesn't look as if many of them got the memo if the Washington Post is representative. One Jennifer Loven renews and repackages the argument that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, implying that there was no connection between Iraq and terrorism.
Administration efforts to link Iraq and al-Qaida and Iraq and Sept. 11 have waxed and waned ever since the 2001 attacks.
But as the editors of the New York Sun point out, arguing over an al Qaeda connection is a red herring.
The hardliners were right, after all. Saddam Hussein was a terror master, and he worked with international Jihad, including Al Qaeda affiliates, throughout the 1990s. The question of direct operational ties to Al Qaeda is a red herring that obscures the more significant point. Our Eli Lake reported on Friday on an Iraqi Intelligence Service memo to Saddam from March 18, 1993, on the terrorist organizations it was then assisting. The memo says, "In a meeting in Sudan, we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." That group, better known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was founded in 1979 by Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who is currently Osama bin Laden's deputy.
It turns out that Saddam ordered that financial support be given to this group that formally merged in 1998 with Al Qaeda. The trove the Pentagon analyzed also contains an order, drafted in 1993, in which Saddam Hussein instructs the sending of fighters to Somalia. That same year Osama bin Laden had sent his own fighters to that country to kill Americans. The Pentagon study goes on to say, "Captured Iraqi archives reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior to OPERATION DESERT STORM (1991)." The analysis of the Iraqi documents does not find that Saddam Hussein controlled Al Qaeda, but that he was willing to align with Islamic terrorists.
Maybe the message is getting through.