For years, those of us, who have been closely monitoring activities of various Islamist and jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda have repeatedly said – this global jihadist outfit is having connections with Iranian Ayatollahs and enjoying their patronization in further expanding its network and activities. Even despite appearing in the 9/11 Commission report, Democrats and their foreign policy allies have denied Iran’s ties to Al Qaeda stating, Iran being a Shiite state would not grant patronization to a Sunni terrorist outfit.
The 9/11 Commission report stated that “senior managers in Al Qaeda maintained contacts with Iran and the Iranian-supported worldwide terrorist organization Hezbollah” and that “Al Qaeda members received advice and training from Hezbollah”. The report went on to describe how Al Qaeda was able to move its people through Iran.
When Iranian IRGC boss Qasem Soleimani was killed by American forces, then-Vice President Mike Pence in a tweet said: Soleimani had “assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan”, of some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US soil.
This would be in line with the 9/11 commission report, as well as admissions by Al Qaeda terrorists, describing the travel of hijackers involved in all four 9/11 attacks passing through Iran.
As was the case each time that the connection between Iran and Al Qaeda came up, media fact checkers and experts swarmed to ridicule the idea. This despite the fact that top Al Qaeda figures, including the man who has now been named as its new leader, were in a safe house operated by Soleimani’s Qods Force, and that Soleimani had personally approved the Al Qaeda base and that even the “welfare of Osama’s family was the personal responsibility” of Qasem Soleimani.
Al Qaeda’s current leader, following the death of Ayman Al-Zawahiri is Saif Al-Adel who has been in Iran since 2003.
According to ABC News, Saif Al-Adel fled to Iran last year to avoid US forces searching for him in neighboring Afghanistan. When he headed to Iran, Al-Adel was wanted for the deaths of Americans in the ‘Black Hawk Down’ attacks in Somalia and the bombings of American embassies in Africa. Even while supposedly in Iranian custody, he ordered the 2003 bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed 9 Americans.
According to Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center:
“Saif Al-Adel had been trained by the Soviets when he was in the Egyptian military before he fought against them, and it’s more likely that he was running Al Qaeda than Osama bin Laden or Zawahiri. Certainly after Bin Laden’s death, Al-Adel became Al Qaeda’s ‘shadow’ emir. With the fall of Afghanistan and growing pressure on Pakistan, Al Qaeda moved its core operations to Iran, where they would be completely out of our reach and where they could coordinate with the regime on waging a Sunni-Shiite terror campaign against American forces in Iraq”.
He further wrote: “The UN report, collecting the information of member states, concedes that “Sayf al-‘Adl is now the de facto leader of Al-Qaida” but that “his leadership cannot be declared because of Al-Qaida’s sensitivity to Afghan Taliban concerns” and “the fact of Sayf al-‘Adl’s presence in the Islamic Republic of Iran”. But after ignoring the fact that a top Al Qaeda leader wanted for the deaths of numerous Americans was in Iran for this long, our leaders will go on ignoring it.
“The State Department, like Al Qaeda and Iran, are all trying to avoid the elephant in the room.
“And that’s because Al Qaeda isn’t what we think it is and it never really was. Making Osama bin Laden into the public face of Al Qaeda, complete with videos of him posing with a Kalashnikov in a cave, and connecting Al Qaeda to the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, manufactured a myth that was useful in recruiting Muslim terrorists and misleading Americans.
With Bin Laden long dead and Al Qaeda much less relevant, few even know that this was propaganda. When we found Osama, he wasn’t hiding in a cave but living in luxury in a Pakistani military town. He had a limited role in the actual leadership and had been laboring to persuade the group that would become ISIS, which back then was known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, to leave Iran’s Shiite allies alone. Instead, ISIS would go on to wage a Sunni-Shiite civil war.
“Al Qaeda became a rebranding of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group, led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama’s successor, and in which Saif Al-Adel, Zawahiri’s successor, played a key role. Behind the mythos of fighters in Afghanistan posing with weaponry in the scrub were a bunch of Egyptians from the Muslim Brotherhood like Zawahiri and Al-Adel.
“Al Qaeda was really just the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in drag. And EIJ had been backed by Iran as payback against Egypt’s Sadat, whom it suspected of plotting to bring it down and restore the Shah’s regime, and later to undermine the Soviet presence next door in Afghanistan”.
According to Daniel Greenfield, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda were at the center of Iran’s plans for a grand Sunni-Shiite alliance that would topple Egypt and Saudi Arabia and drive out America.
He further said, “When Al Qaeda provided seed money for what would become ISIS, an Iraqi Jihadist movement that brought together Saddam’s old guard with a Jihadist pipeline running through Syria, the Sunni-Shiite alliance appeared underway. The Iraq War became what we know it as: a failed effort that cost a lot of American lives. But the alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda did not prove to be a model for bringing Iraqis together to fight the United States. Instead it divided Al Qaeda.
“Iraqi Shiites wanted payback against the Sunni minority that had ruled them. And Iraqi Sunnis, including those funded by Al Qaeda, found that the quickest way to become popular and recruit fighters was by targeting Iraqi Shiites. Both hated each other even more than they hated us.
“Al Qaeda defeated our plans for Iraq, but at the cost of making a mockery of its own ambition to unite the Muslim world. A year after Al-Adel relocated to Iran, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, built with a few thousand in seed money from Bin Laden, accused Shiites of being pagans, infidels and atheists, and responsible for Islamic defeats throughout history”.
According to Greenfield: “In Afghanistan, as in Syria and Iraq, ISIS has forced the Taliban and the former Haqqani allies of Al Qaeda to play defense for the Shiites, protecting their mosques and appeasing Iran. The rise of the Sunni-Shiite civil war as the defining conflict has spread from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan proving that Islamic infighting can be even more seductive than fighting us.
“But that has been true throughout Muslim history. One reason we’re all not living under Sharia is that its proponents have a tendency to kill each other over their theological debates.
“The complex role of Al Qaeda and Iran in Syria’s civil war is driven home by the UN’s mention that Hurras al-Din, an Al Qaeda branch in Syria, is taking orders from Al-Adel. Even while the conventional narrative depicted a Sunni-Shiite conflict, the civil war was actually a much messier situation in which Syria, Iran, Russia, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIS were alternately allying and fighting each other in the kind of conflict that only makes sense if you understand Arab clan warfare. Even as Iran acted as Assad’s lifeline, it was also funding and arming elements of Al Qaeda that alternated between fighting Assad and ISIS”.
Following 9/11 terror attack on American soil, when Al Qaeda jihadists first arrived in Iran in a large number, Tehran rolled out the red carpet for them.
In a book titled ‘The Exile’, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark described how “they were put up at the white monolith of the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street, just down from General Suleimani’s headquarters in the former US embassy” with “room service, a ladies-only gym, movies, and a swimming pool for the children” where “former fighters sat down together in comfort for the first time since 9/11”.
Although counterterrorism experts throughout the world are tracking Al Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS) and other jihadist groups as key threat to the West and the world – particularly non-Muslim nations, the actual risk would ultimately be the growing Muslim population in the world – including the United States. Several years ago, Libyan leader Muammar Al Gaddafi said:
“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades”.
Meanwhile, during the past several years, the size of Muslim population in Europe and the United States has increased by few more millions, as every year, a large number of Muslim immigrants are entering those Western countries. Meanwhile, there is alarming rise in Muslim population in almost all the “non-Muslim” nations, including India. At such scenarios, counterterrorism experts would say – Osama Bin Laden’s approach could kill thousands of “non-Muslims”, Iran’s nuclear weapons can kill millions or tens of millions, but only Gaddafi’s demographic weapons could eliminate America and put other non-Muslim nations into serious security threat.
