Last week, the CIA sent an urgent report to President Bush’s National Security Council: Iranian authorities had arrested two al-Qaeda operatives traveling through Iran on their way from Pakistan to Iraq. The suspects were caught along a well-worn, if little-noticed, route for militants determined to fight U.S. troops on Iraqi soil, according to a senior intelligence official.
The arrests were presented to Bush’s senior policy advisers as evidence that Iran appears committed to stopping al-Qaeda foot traffic across its borders, the intelligence official said. That assessment comes at a time when the Bush administration, in an effort to push for further U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic, is preparing to publicly accuse Tehran of cooperating with and harboring al-Qaeda suspects.
The strategy has sparked a growing debate within the administration and the intelligence community, according to U.S. intelligence and government officials. One faction is pressing for more economic embargoes against Iran, including asset freezes and travel bans for the country’s top leaders. But several senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials worry that a public push regarding the al-Qaeda suspects held in Iran could jeopardize U.S. intelligence-gathering and prompt the Iranians to free some of the most wanted individuals.
The Iranian government has been capturing, holding and using as bargaining chips al-Qaeda members since they started streaming across their border in the winter of 2001. Apparently, they want to trade the U.S. some senior al-Qaeda members (including a son of Osama bin Laden) for the release of Iranian militants. However, who can trust the Iranian government.
U.S. officials have asserted for years that several dozen al-Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden’s son, slipped across the Afghan border into Iran as U.S. troops hunted for the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. U.S. and allied intelligence services, which have monitored the men’s presence inside Iran, reported that Tehran was holding them under house arrest as bargaining chips for potential deals with Washington.
I know Nancy Pelosi said there aren’t any al-Qaeda ’soldiers’ fighting our Troops in Iraq, but I suggest that she may be wrong about that. *cough*
There are so many fronts our Troops are facing. When you consider the mess the middle east is and always has been. There is no love lost between Iran and al-Qaeda and Iraq and any other population of people in the middle east. The shiites hate the sunnis and they both hate the kurds. All of them hate Iran and none of them have any use for palestinians. They all will use al-Qaeda unless al-Qaeda can use them first. They’ll destroy any of the others they can.
The only thing that unites them is their hatred of Israel.
To think that our Troops aren’t dealing with Iran, Syria and al-Qaeda in Iraq is the epitome of naive.