Iraq & al-Qaeda: Is There a Link?

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Dozens of al-Qaeda fighters have fled Afghanistan into northern Iraq

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Last year, the Islamists morphed into their current incarnation as the "Supporters of Islam," which almost certainly includes members who trained in terrorism at al-Qaeda's Afghan camps. Bin Laden probably recruited men from among Ansar disciples. Today Ansar may well include some al-Qaeda fighters looking for a new nest. Kurdish officials say the group has swollen to around 700, but U.S. intelligence puts the number at a little over 100.

The telling allegation, made again last week by New York Times columnist William Safire, is that Saddam secretly runs Ansar. According to Safire's unsourced pronouncement, a Saddam intelligence operative and a senior bin Laden agent helped coordinate an assault by Ansar militants to assassinate the secular, pro-American Kurdish leadership last year. Both, he claimed, were captured when Kurdish forces put down the revolt. Safire also fingered Saddam's agents as the men behind Ansar's crude attempts to make poison weapons that drew Pentagon attention.

Yet while Ansar may share Saddam's desire to destroy the Kurdish leadership in April, Ansar unsuccessfully attempted to kill one faction's prime minister when Assistant Secretary of State Ryan Crocker was visiting the area the Iraqi dictator does not appear to have direct control over the Kurdish militants. Both Saddam and al-Qaeda may find Ansar's activities useful, but there's no evidence that the group serves as a link between them.

The hawks point to another piece of circumstantial evidence. Since last fall the U.S. has tried to confirm a Czech intelligence report that in April 2001, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Both the CIA and FBI have disputed the report. Their research places Atta in Florida two days before the purported meeting, and they could not uncover any travel or financial records to prove Atta had made a quick flight to Prague. But early this month several Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, met with the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism, Pat D'Amuro, to quiz the FBI again about the Czech report. Officials from both agencies who attended the meeting deny that Wolfowitz pressured the briefers to confirm that the Prague rendezvous took place. But the FBI says the Pentagon team tried, with success, to persuade the bureau to concede that reports of the meeting are at least possible.

Other points of suspicion have come from Iraqi defectors. A former army officer now under the protection of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress has repeated to numerous U.S. officials and reporters his tale of a camp at Salman Pak, just outside Baghdad, run by the Iraqi secret police as a training school for potential terrorists from across the Arab world. Among other things, he said, the camp uses the fuselage of a Boeing 707 to practice hijackings. Early this year Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a mercenary now in Kurdish custody who says he worked for Saddam's secret police, told interviewers that in 2000 the regime set aside $16 million for nine terrorist operations, including a scuttled suicide attack Shahab was supposed to organize against a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf.

Another defector, from Iraq's intelligence service, told a Vanity Fair reporter that Saddam's son Uday oversees a vicious 1,200-man commando force called al-Qarea, trained to carry out terrorist attacks against American targets. Washington counterterrorism experts are skeptical about whether Iraq really boasts such a cadre. A U.S. official who studies Iraq says al-Qarea is probably a ragtag collection of men Uday dressed up as militants to impress his father.

Other items the hard-liners like to list seem even longer on speculation. They point to a visit bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri supposedly made to Saddam in 1992. But Zawahiri was then the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and had not yet hooked up with al-Qaeda. Nor has the CIA been able to verify a Saddam-Zawahiri meeting, especially at a time when Baghdad was trying to improve relations with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Zawahiri's prime target.

Shahab, the imprisoned mercenary, claimed that in 1999 Iraqi officials paid him to smuggle several dozen liquid-filled refrigerator canisters into Afghanistan for the Taliban. Did they contain chemical agents or bio germs? Shahab does not know, and U.S. intelligence has been unable to confirm the report. Officials question whether the idea makes sense. Documents recovered in Afghanistan show al-Qaeda had its own blueprints for cooking up chemical weapons.

The hard-liners seem to think that by repeating this kind of unsubstantiated speculation, they can force Bush to stick to his vow to take on Saddam even though, as White House aides insisted last week, he still does not have a plan for doing so. "Some people are, by design, trying to put him into a corner on this," says an official who works on Iraq policy. "They're arguing that if we don't attack, Saddam will win yet again because of the harm that will do to American credibility."

It's only prudent for U.S. intelligence to track any hint that Saddam may try to enlist a terrorist network in his battle against America. But the hawks are doing damage to their own cause by trumpeting unproved allegations of Saddam's links to bin Laden that could undermine more substantial reasons for taking down a dangerous dictator. The al-Qaeda connection looks too tenuous now to justify war with Iraq. If the President is truly concerned about preserving American credibility, he needs to do a more persuasive job explaining why another war against Iraq is worth the effort.