is helping the group raise money and recruit terrorists under a “secret deal.”
The US Treasury Department last week sanctioned six men it said were major figures in Al-Qaeda’s fundraising and recruitment efforts. All six are Arabs, but one of them is based in Iran and manages the other five, the Treasury Department indicated.
In a written statement, it said the group “operat[es] under an agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government.… Iran is a critical transit point for funding to support Al-Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” It said the agreement dates back six years.
David S. Cohen, the new under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said, “By exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”
But the announcement was much more than illumination. It painted Iran as a partner in acts of war against the United States and could be used in the future to justified military action against Iran. The Bush Administration carefully avoided accusing Iran of any acts of war, but the Obama Administration has reversed that.
Under the Bush Administration, military officials regularly said that Iranians were helping Iraqi insurgents attack American troops—but they repeatedly said they did not know if those actions were approved by the highest levels of the Iranian state or just carried out on the initiative of lower ranking officials.
The Obama Administration has ceased giving the Islamic Republic that out. And in Wednesday’s announcement, it directly charged, twice, that there is “an agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government.”
The Treasury Department said the central figure was Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, 29, who was born in Syria. It said Khalil is “currently living and operating in Iran. Iranian authorities … have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005.
The statement said Khalil “moves money and recruits from across the Middle East into Iran, then on to Pakistan for the benefit of Al-Qaeda senior leaders.”
Another of the six named is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who is believed to have risen to the Number Two position in Al-Qaeda since the death of Osama bin Laden. The Treasury said he had previously been named by bin Laden as Al-Qaeda’s “emissary in Iran, a position which allowed him to travel in and out of Iran with the permission of Iranian officials.”
Three others named are resident in Qatar and Kuwait and are described as fund-raisers and recruiters for Al-Qaeda who funnel money and recruits to Khalil in Iran. An unnamed official told The Washington Post that Kuwait and Qatar were lax about cutting off fund-raising for terrorists, unlike Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have cracked down hard.
The sanctions imposed on the six men are the usual freezing of their assets in the United States and a ban on American residents doing business with them. An official briefing reporters acknowledged that the sanctions themselves had little if any impact, but said a key purpose of the announcement was to expose “Iranian support for international terrorism.”
The idea of ties between Al-Qaeda and Iran has been a popular theme of the far right in the United States. US officials have generally played down talk of such links, pointing out that Al-Qaeda is a Sunni movement that is staunchly anti-Shia. But US intelligence now believes both Iran and Al-Qaeda see benefits from working together. Still, intelligence generally believes Iran-Qaeda cooperation against the United States is limited and that neither party fully trusts the other.
Iran swiftly denied the Treasury Department accusations. Ali-Reza Mir-Yusefi, a spokesman for Iran’s mission at the United Nations, told The Washington Post that American officials were trying to tarnish Iran’s reputation with “baseless allegations.” As Iranian officials have done for years, he cited the fact that terrorists have targeted Iran as evidence that the Islamic Republic opposes terrorism.
The Treasury Department action was not the first time the US government had spoken of Iran-Qaeda links. The Bush Administration complained almost a decade ago about Iran giving sanctuary to Al-Qaeda leaders who had fled Afghanistan after the US invasion of 2001.
And last year, Gen. David Petraeus, who is about to take over as head of the CIA, wrote in a response to Congress that Al-Qaeda uses Iran as a “key facilitation hub.… Although Iranian authorities do periodically disrupt this network by detaining select Al-Qaeda facilitators and operational planners, Tehran’s policy in this regard is often unpredictable.”
The Associated Press emphasized the nature of the Iran-Qaeda links remains “murky” to analysts in the US government. It said the many branches of the intelligence community disagree as to whether Iran backs Al-Qaeda as a matter of policy or convenience. But the Treasury statement came down firmly on that issue, saying there was an “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda.
The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed official as saying, “The Iranians are allowing their territory to be used by this network.… I think it stands to reason that Iran is getting something out of this as well.”
But officials did not say what they thought Iran was getting out of it. There was speculation that Iran was simply happy to help Al-Qaeda create problems for the United States, in effect distracting the Americans from Iran. Others thought there was a more fundamental concern—that Iran was essentially paying protection money to Al-Qaeda, allowing it to operate in Iran as a guarantee that Al-Qaeda would not then take any action against Iran or its interests. Others noted that those two explanations are not mutually exclusive and that both could easily be motivating the Islamic Republic.
Al-Qaeda is ideologically opposed to Iran as a Shiite state. Several years after the fact, it emerged that an Al-Qaeda operative penetrated the inner sanctum of the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad in the 1990s and planted a bomb there, a purely anti-Shia action. Al-Qaeda appears to have modified its anti-Shiism since the 2001 when the Americans lowered the boom and Al-Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary.
The Treasury action has lit up lights among many on the right who have been critical of Obama policy on Iran. The Washington Times editorialized last week, “The Obama Administration is going where no White House has gone before: directly accusing Iran of supporting Al-Qaeda. This long overdue move to get tough on Tehran deserves to be applauded.”
Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy wrote an analysis of the Treasury statement that concluded: “The Treasury designation highlights that US differences with Iran extend well beyond the nuclear impasse. Coming after a month of US statements about stepped-up Iranian support for insurgents killing US soldiers in southern Iraq, the designation suggests that US-Iran relations would be tense or worse even if he nuclear impasse were resolved.”