From his hideout after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein warned the insurgency against working too closely with ”jihadists” who had come to fight the US-led occupation, according to a document reported yesterday.
An order signed by the ousted leader, pointing out the dangers of jihadists, was found among documents in the briefcase with him when he was captured last month, according to the New York Times. The intelligence report based on the document is said to be circulating in the administration. The directive expressed Saddam’s fears that the Islamists would hijack the insurgency for their own ends, and were not interested in restoring the Ba’athist regime. He instructs leaders of the insurgency not to allow the alliance to become too close.
The document further undermines pre-war and post-war claims by President George Bush’s administration that Saddam had close links with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Instead, it confirmed the long-held belief of CIA analysts and British intelligence that the two — one a secular dictator, the other a religious zealot — mistrusted each other deeply, and that Saddam would have been loath to share any weapons secrets he might have had with a group he could not control.
”He never trusted the Islamists. He never cooperated with Osama. This rings absolutely true,” said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert at the National Defence University.
The CIA’s deputy director, John McLaughlin, recently said that the agency believed that 90% of the insurgents were former Ba’ath party loyalists. However, foreign jihadists are believed to have brought with them suicide tactics, and are cooperating with Ba’athists at least at street level. The document suggests the cooperation is new and improvised.
A month before going to war, President Bush told Americans: ”Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct, and continuing ties to terrorist networks … Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s Iraq has also provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”
Vice-president Dick Cheney repeated claims of the link, even after the fall of Baghdad.
CIA officials who tracked al-Qaeda in the 1990s say they believe there were meetings between Iraqi intelligence and the al-Qaeda leadership in Sudan and in Afghanistan, but they did not lead to significant cooperation.
Ms Yaphe said: ”You’re Saddam and you have an intelligence service. Wouldn’t you want to meet these people and see if you could use them, figure out what they want, suborn them? It doesn’t mean you’re working together.”
Claims of a direct link between the September 11 hijackers and the Saddam regime remain unproved. – Guardian Unlimited Â