WarSclerotic

Investors.com – Iran As Al-Qaida Base.

Posted 06:59 PM ET

Terrorism: The connections between Islamofascist Iran and al-Qaida have been clear for many years. Maybe now that the architect of the Iraq surge is warning about it, the alarming truth will be accepted.

Gen. David Petraeus, the counter-insurgency expert now heading the U.S. Central Command after successfully turning around the war in Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday of Tehran and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group working together.

Al-Qaida “continues to use Iran as a key facilitation hub, where facilitators connect al-Qaida’s senior leadership to regional affiliates,” Petraeus said. “And although Iranian authorities do periodically disrupt this network by detaining select al-Qaida facilitators and operational planners, Tehran’s policy in this regard is often unpredictable.”

The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz quoted a counterterrorism official within the U.S. government who said “the Iranian government knows” that al-Qaida operatives are stationed in Iran.

The National Counterterrorism Center has reported that “Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qaida members it has detained, and has refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody.” The Center noted that “Iran also continued to fail to control the activities of some AQ members who fled to Iran following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.”

For years we’ve heard claims that Shiites like the champions of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s now 30-year-old revolution in Iran and Sunni terrorists like those in al-Qaida simply won’t work together in big ways. But that view was discredited long before Petraeus’ warning this week.

Imad Mughniyah, a high-ranking member of the Iranian-supported Hezbollah terror group who served as liaison between Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence, and who was associated with the Marine barracks and U.S. embassy bombings in Beirut in 1983, was a Lebanese Shiite. But bin Laden was willing to meet with him in the Sudan in 1993 because he was impressed by the embassy attack.

“The two agreed they would work together,” Michael Ledeen notes in his book, “The Iranian Time Bomb.” “Subsequently, Hezbollah trained al-Qaida terrorists in Lebanon, Iran and Sudan. It is fair to say that a great deal of al-Qaida’s methods, technology and worldview came from the Islamic Republic, primarily from Mughniyah.” Mughniyah was assassinated two years ago, possibly by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

Ledeen notes “Iran is a major center for al-Qaida, and the Germans identified roughly a dozen camps around Tehran where al-Qaida terrorists were taken care of by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” In addition, Ledeen says: “Al-Qaida and Hezbollah moved gold and diamonds from Karachi to Sudan, via Iran.

This entry was posted on March 19, 2010 at 5:46 AM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.