Foxnews.com should be thanked and lauded for providing Ray Robinson a forum to present his findings from captured Iraqi intelligence documents. In the first installment, Robinson’s team of translators found links between Saddam’s inner circle and terrorists. Specifically, the regime had links to the Taliban then in control of Afghanistan. The Taliban was in turn symbiotically protecting and in league with al Qaeda, which was at the time attacking the US and its interests around the world (we’re talking about events circa 1999, a year after the 1998 bin Laden fatwa against the US urging Muslims to kill Americans however and wherever they can).
The second installment provides further evidence of a Saddam-Taliban alliance.
The final installment of the Saddam Dossier finds the Saddam regime brokering terrorism on an international scale.
The relationship between the Taliban and Saddam appears to have been mediated by a Pakistani named Maulana Fazlur Rahman. Another document captured in Afghanistan and written by an Al Qaeda operative confirms the relationship between the Maulana and Saddam. The translation provided here includes an early 1999 meeting between the director of the IIS and the Maulana.
Another notebook entry records a meeting with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghani Islamic Jihadist and leader of the Islamic Party in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar made news recently with the BBC article Afghan Rebel’s pledge to al-Qaeda that reports on a video statement from Hekmatyar in which he states he will fight alongside A Qaeda. In this translation, Hekmatyar makes specific requests for a “center” in Baghdad and/or Tajikistan.
A third meeting involves an Islamist representing Bangladesh that we believe to be Fazlur Rahman Khalil. Another page of the notebook indicates Khalil is coming or came to Iraq. Khalil is a Taliban/Al Qaeda associate who signed the 1998 fatwa from Usama bin Laden declaring war on the United States.
You owe it to yourself to read the entire Saddam Dossier. It’s an eye-opening and vitally important look at how Saddam’s regime was interacting with terrorists behind the scenes. It turns out that the view of Saddam as a secular ruler uninterested in links with radical Islamists is false: Not only was Saddam Hussein funding terrorism openly and directly in the Palestinian Authority (by paying the families of suicide bombers), he was courting and and engaging the Taliban and brokering terrorist training arrangements all across the Islamic world.
And we have learned all of this from a single notebook kept by an IIS agent who was in the loop. What else might we learn by translating and analyzing the millions of other documents captured during the war?
