Real Threat from Iran is Here, Now

John R. Bradley, The Straits Times:

With the West focused on long-term fears of Iran's nuclear ambitions, heightened by the Iranian president's recent public call for Israel to be wiped off the map, a short-term threat posed by the Iranian regime is not getting the attention it deserves.

A nuclear-armed Iran is indeed a serious threat, but a future one; and there is even a small chance diplomacy may resolve it before it becomes reality. However, the deadly consequences of an Iran-al-Qaida terrorist alliance is already with us, in the form of Iran harboring dozens of top al-Qaida leaders while providing bomb-making equipment for Iraqi insurgents.

The 9/11 Commission said that al-Qaida passed freely through Iran before the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including at least eight of the "muscle" hijackers that commandeered the airplanes. Iran has fiercely denied allegations that it is supporting the terrorist organization. Last week, however, the country admitted that it has apprehended more than 1,000 members of al-Qaida since the fall of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan in 2001. Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Younessi has said most have been jailed or deported, but some 200 suspects remain "in custody." Trials for these remaining individuals have long been promised, but endlessly postponed.

The latest admission that this small band of seemingly "special" terrorists exists inside the country came just days after an influential German monthly magazine, Cicero, reported that Iran is permitting about 25 high-ranking members to roam free in Teheran, including three sons of Osama bin Laden. The magazine said the individuals in question are from Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Europe, and are living in houses belonging to Iran's Revolutionary Guards. "This is not incarceration or house arrest," a Western intelligence agent was quoted by the report as saying. "They can move around as they please."

Three sons of Osama bin Laden - Saeed, Mohammad and Othman - are in Iran, Cicero reported, adding that another person enjoying support was al-Qaida spokesman Abu Ghaib. The Revolutionary Guards' secret service is said to be offering logistical support and military training to many of these senior al-Qaida leaders.

A curious fact is that Osama himself, although hostile to the Shiites, has never attacked the Iranian theocracy, or in fact even mentioned them, in any of his interviews or fatwas over the past decade. READ MORE

To be sure, general allegations of this kind of complicity between Iran and al-Qaida are hardly new. In February 2004, for instance, top Spanish anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon claimed al-Qaida had a "board of managers" operating in Iran. And I myself reported, in a dispatch from Saudi Arabia for the London Sunday Times in August 2003, that a letter from Osama and a telephone call made from Iran by his eldest son and al-Qaida chief-in-waiting, Saad, were being linked to a series of terrorist actions targeting Westerners in the kingdom. Two days before the May 2003 bombings against residential compounds in Riyadh, which killed 34 people, Saad made a telephone call from somewhere in Iran to a member of the same al-Qaida gang, Saudi security sources told me.

What makes the Cicero study especially interesting is the in-depth analysis it provides on these and other events, and the caliber of the investigative journalist who was the author of it. Bruno Schirra has an excellent track record, having written an expose of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi in which he quoted extensively from German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation documents that collated data from German, American, French and Israeli intelligence sources.

As the Weekly Standard notes in its latest issue, these documents, some of which were classified, listed Zarqawi's activities, passports, phone numbers, mosques used or controlled by his followers in Germany, and his benefactors. In addition to confirming much of the evidence presented by former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council on the activities of Zarqawi's network in Europe, the documents also stated point-blank that Iran "provided Zarqawi with logistical support on the part of the state."

Earlier this month, a senior British general repeated a claim that bomb-making technology is crossing into Iraq from Iran. Maj.-Gen. Jim Dutton, who commands a multinational force in southeastern Iraq, said the know-how for advanced bombs was coming "across that border." Iran denied similar claims when they were first made in October, after an increase in British casualties in Iraq. Gen. Dutton nevertheless insisted "the technology certainly, and probably the equipment, is coming through (the Iran-Iraq border)." He added that he did not know whether this was Iranian government policy or whether it was simply groups using Iran for their own purposes and not being controlled. Defense sources quoted independently by the BBC were more blunt, saying that the Revolutionary Guards, an elite fighting force appointed by the country's supreme leader, were indeed giving original bomb-making training to Iraq's insurgents.

At first and even second glance, allegations of an alliance between Iran and al-Qaida, especially if it incorporates cells affiliated to the terror organization presently operating in Iraq, defies all sense and logic. For a start, Iran is Persian/Shiite, while al-Qaida is Arab/Sunni. And the overwhelming majority of civilian victims in Iraq since the start of the U.S.-led war have been Shiites, deliberately targeted in suicide attacks by Sunni extremists (and often during Shiite religious holidays). Indeed, Zarqawi recently declared war on Shiites.

But leaving aside the Zarqawi connection for the moment, it now seems clear that Iran and al-Qaida generally have been drawn together, despite their obvious ideological and religious differences, by a common goal: to facilitate global jihad and help hasten American failure in Iraq.

In fact, the oddest thing about this collaboration, on closer inspection, is that it is not new: al-Qaida is long thought by intelligence experts to have collaborated with Iran in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. marines.

The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was seen as a triumph for the Shiites, but also - because of its anti-American, anti-imperialist rhetoric - proved to be an inspiration for Sunni extremists, including those who took over Mecca's Grand Mosque that year.

The relationship between Iran and Zarqawi, who has been refocusing operations in Iraq against Shiite civilians particularly during the October holy month of Ramadan, is more complicated. Such attacks obviously antagonize Iran, and leave it caught between a rock and a hard place. However, the bomb specialists the British argue are trained by the Iranians are said to return to Basra not to attack Shiites, but rather to spread their knowledge among fellow insurgents who target British military convoys.

Is this, then, part of some secret deal - we will train you and protect you, but kill Britons with the bombs and not our fellow Shiites? In any case, what is certainly true is that Iraq's Shiite leaders have for some time been quietly pressuring Iran for help against Zarqawi's murderous al-Qaida terrorists. If reports of Iran supporting Zarqawi become more persistent and credible, and the attacks on Iraq's Shi'ites continue, such complaints from Iraqi leaders could turn public.

That would prove extremely embarrassing for Iranian Islamic conservatives, and could force Iran finally to reconsider its unholy alliance with al-Qaida.