United States forces have arrested a top Iraqi militant who acted as a link between al-Qaeda’s Iraqi offshoot and Osama bin Laden, the global jihadist network’s Saudi founder, the US military said on Wednesday.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said American troops had arrested Khaled al-Mashhadani, a senior Iraqi figure in a local group otherwise dominated by foreign-born extremists, on July 4 in the northern city of Mosul.
Under interrogation, he said, Mashhadani revealed that propaganda tapes released by al-Qaeda in Iraq’s supposed Iraqi kingpin, Omar al-Baghdadi, were in fact voiced by an actor under the command of an Egyptian militant.
“Mashhadani is believed to be the most senior Iraqi in the al-Qaeda in Iraq network. He is a close associate of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born head of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Bergner said.
The statement came at a time of intense dispute in Washington about the place of Iraq in the US’s global war on terror.
The US military sees al-Qaeda as a foreign-led interloper rather than an Iraqi resistance group and wants to isolate it from support from nationalist Iraqis opposed to foreign interference.
Meanwhile, President George Bush and the White House are keen boost support for the war by tying al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq to Bin Laden’s network, which was behind the September 11 attacks on US soil.
Bush therefore argues that the war in Iraq is the central front of his war on terror, while his opponents counter that support for al-Qaeda only erupted in Iraq as a result of anger at the US-led invasion.
Bergner said al-Qaeda in Iraq was a “real organisation” taking its broad directions from Bin Laden and his Egyptian number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who are believed to be holed up somewhere in north-west Pakistan. — AFP