Negotiations about about a possible alliance between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda took place in 1998, according to documents found in Baghdad by a British newspaper.
The papers found in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s feared secret police, show that an envoy from the terror group was sent to the Iraqi capital in March 1998 from Sudan. It was in Sudan that al-Qaeda had been based until 1996, when its leadership moved to Afghanistan after the Sudanese government bowed to pressure from the United States to expel Osama bin Laden’s organisation.
The find will be seized on by the US and British intelligence services who have so far struggled to prove a link between bin Laden and the fallen Iraqi regime.
The Sunday Telegraph claims the papers show that the meeting, which took as its starting point a common hatred of America and Saudi Arabia, was spread out over a full week. It ended with discussions about a visit to Baghdad by the al-Qaeda leader himself. The representative stayed at the al-Mansour Melia hotel at the expense of the Iraqi government.
These talks took place a month after bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa establishing a World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. This religious statement said: ‘To kill Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim.’
Five months after the visit to Baghdad, al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and Nairobi in Kenya, killing more than 300 people and injuring 5 000.
Other Mukhabarat documents include a paper from 19 February 1998 containing plans for the trip to be arranged through the Iraqi intelligence service’s station in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
A letter says a message to be relayed to the al-Qaeda leader would ‘relate to the future of our relationship with bin Laden, and achieve a direct meeting with him’.
The letter recommends bringing the al-Qaeda envoy to Iraq as a way of maintaining contacts with bin Laden. The documents are said to be countersigned by the deputy director general of the Mukhabarat.
The find coincides with the capture of former Mukhabarat head of operations Farouk Hijazi near the Syrian border on Friday. Washington has said Hijazi was Iraq’s key link man with al-Qaeda, and that he travelled to meet him at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Remarkable though it is, the find is unlikely to be the ‘smoking gun’ the US and Britain are looking for.
Representatives from the Mukhabarat are known to have travelled to Kandahar in the late Nineties to build links with al-Qaeda. Most analysts believe, however, that the ideological differences between the Iraqis and the terrorists were insurmountable.
The talks are thought to have ended disastrously for the Iraqis, as bin Laden rejected any kind of alliance, preferring to pursue his own policy of global jihad , or holy war.
A senior US politician warned Syria last night that it had made ‘historic mistakes’ in its policy towards Iraq, and said an end to support for ‘terrorist’ organisations was a prerequisite for improving Damascus’s ties with the US.
‘Syria’s position in the United States…dropped dramatically as we saw the transfer of military equipment from and through Syria to Iraq,’ said Tom Lantos, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives’ International Relations Committee.
‘These were very bad mistakes, historic mistakes, and the time is long overdue to correct the course of Syrian policy,’ Lantos said after meeting Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
The congressman warned: ‘We find it unacceptable…that there should be headquarters of terrorist organisations in Damascus. These will need to be closed if Syria is to forge a new relationship with the United States.’ – – Guardian Unlimited Â