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Saddam and Al Qaeda

(London Evening Standard) David Rose - According to the conventional wisdom, Saddam is a "secular" dictator, whose loathing for Islamic fundamentalism is intense. Yet Hamas, the fundamentalist Palestinian group, whose gift to the world is the suicide bomb, has maintained a Baghdad office - funded by Saddam - for many years. His intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, has a special department whose sole function is liaison with Hamas. In 1993, Abdul Rahman Yasin made the truck bomb which wrought destruction and killed six in the first New York World Trade Center attack - then coolly boarded a plane for Baghdad, where he still resides. A very senior CIA man told me that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had met Mukhabarat officers in the months before the attack in the United Arab Emirates. CIA reports contain almost 100 separate examples of Iraq-al Qaeda co-operation going back to 1992.
2002-12-12 00:00:00
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