Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[hap0206]

...those who harbor a terrorist etc
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Jordanian Embassy Bombing and Hizballah Bombardment - Dual Show of Tehran`s Muscle

DEBKAfile Special Report

August 9, 2003, 10:04 PM (GMT+02:00)

The fingerprints of Ansar al-Islam, the Iraqi fundamentalist terror group linked to Al Qaeda, prompted Washington to place the FBI at the head of the investigation into the Jordanian embassy bombing in Baghdad Thursday, August 7, in which 19 people lost their lives and over 60 were injured. The day after, Lt.-Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations at the US Joint Staff, named the group as the possible perpetrators. Saturday, August 9, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said non-Iraqi terrorists were responsible. He warned that the infiltration of Iraq by armed fighters from neighboring countries could raise tensions between the United States and those countries.

Early in the Iraq War, American bombers wiped out Ansar al-Islam’s main headquarters in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq near the Iranian border. But US administrator Paul Bremer said recently that the group was reconstituting and members filtering back into Iraq from Iran.

What Bremer did not spell out was that Ansar members could only have returned to Iraq with a blessing, logistical aid and funding from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards special intelligence arm which owns a strong presence on both sides of the Iranian-Iraqi border.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror analysts note that the US official reference to Ansar al Islam was tantamount to blaming Tehran for the Jordanian embassy outrage. And if Iran, our analysts say, then the key al Qaeda figure uniquely qualified to orchestrate the attack must have been Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who is also in Iranian hands.

DEBKAfile has kept close track of this Jordanian-Palestinian terror master’s checkered career. In October 2001, a month after the September 11 hijack-bombings in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, our sources exposed Ansar’s main headquarters at Bayara in northern Iraq and Zarqawi’s presence there. We reported that he was part of a secret chemical and biological weapons experimentation project run there in the darkest secrecy by Iraqi intelligence officers. DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that Zarqawi is the only al Qaeda agent known to intelligence experts to have spent time in early 2000 at the Salman Pak facility 25 miles southeast of Baghdad for instruction in advanced terrorist and air hijacking techniques.

On Saturday, August 9, official sources in Washington uncovered information received for the first time that Iraq provided al Qaeda with training facilities and the components of chemical and biological weapons systems. The information came from recently captured al Qaeda men under interrogation. It aroused scant interest because most media are intent on questioning the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam had operational links with al Qaeda.

http://ad.debka.com/pictures_e/Zarqawi.jpg