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As is known, Isis originated with Osama bin laden and his
Islamic Jihad, but many overlook the importance of another player in the
equation, Iran. Over the past 20 years, Iranian intelligence has provided
financial, material, technological and other support to al Qaeda in Iraq.
After the announcement of the organization of the Islamic
state, they claimed responsibility for the Paris
attacks. Western intelligence services doubled efforts to detect
the cells of the European Islamic jihad and at the same time increased air
strikes against Isis in Iraq and Syria. No one expected them to be able to
carry out the biggest terrorist attack in Europe since the train bombings
in Madrid in 2004.
There was a sign that Europe was facing a terrorist
expansion in their countries. The indication came from those who carried
off the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abu Oud, who boasted about the attack in
an interview with the French-language magazine Dabeq. He easily
escaped the Belgian authorities and moved freely between Syria and Europe.
The question raised by Abu Oud's boast is how he succeeded
in moving from a small group of Islamist Mujahideen who fought the Soviets
in Afghanistan to the most powerful terrorist organization in the world.
Even though Isis originated with Osama bin laden and his
Islamic Jihad, many overlooked the importance of another player in the
equation, Iran. This may seem surprising given Iran's involvement in
a regional war against Isis, but Iranian intelligence, described by the
Pentagon as "one of the biggest and most dynamic intelligence agencies
in the Middle East," has provided financial, material, technological
and other support to al Qaeda in Iraq over the past 20 years. Imad
Mughniyeh, who led an extensive network of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and
several small terrorist groups in five continents, was responsible for the
affair.
In his book "The Secret War with Iran," Israeli
journalist Ronen Bergman notes that the Syrian regime pledged during the
1982 summer meeting in Damascus to give full support to Iran's efforts to
establish Hezbollah. In exchange for oil, the Syrian regime agreed to the
entry of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards into Lebanon and oversee the
construction of an Iranian-backed armed group. The first to be recruited
into the force was Imad Mughniyeh, whose beginnings are tied to Force 17 of
the PLO.
It was not long before Mughniyah began planning several
operations, including the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in April
1983. According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, this was the deadliest
attack on a US diplomatic mission since the United States was founded.
The period until the end of the 1980s saw numerous
operations and attacks that were planned. When the Iran-Iraq war ended, the
Iranian regime saw its end as an opportunity to expand in the Arab region.
Imad Mughniyeh worked with the newly established Quds Force, whose mission
was to export the Islamic revolution worldwide. Because of Mughniyeh's
success in raising Hezbollah to the ranks of other major players in
Lebanon, he was an important element in fulfilling the Quds Force's task of
forming armed groups around the world.
Mughniyeh soon established a vast network of elements
associated with the Quds Force in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
In the meantime, Sudan became the second regime to declare
itself Islamic after the coup of Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 1989. Among the
jihadi organizations hosted by the al-Bashir regime is the Egyptian
"Jihad" organization led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the pillars
of al-Qaeda. Zawahri traveled to Tehran in 1991 to seek help in
overthrowing the Egyptian regime. Mughniyah went to Sudan to help
al-Zawahri in the framework of an agreement he reached with the Iranians.
Tehran offered to fund the Egyptian jihad and provide training camps for
its operatives in Iran and Lebanon. After Osama bin Laden moved to Sudan, he
met Mughniyah, the leader of al Qaeda, who knew his role in Lebanon
and his planned attacks there. Bin Laden hoped his organization would
achieve similar results around the world.
Bin Laden could not have carried out attacks in the West
without Mughniyah's help. Because of their confluence, Mughniyah offered
bin Laden training of his cadres in Hezbollah camps in the Bekaa, Lebanon
between 1993 and 1996. Some of bin Laden's men were sent to Iran, where
they were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and supplied with
explosives and weapons for bin Laden's subsequent operations. The common
denominator between bin Laden and the Iranian regime was their hostility to
Saudi Arabia.
Mughniyah gave his help to Zawahri and bin Laden in the
bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in late 1995 that killed 17
people. When the Sudanese regime ousted bin Laden under pressure from the
West, he moved with his cadres to Afghanistan with Mughniyah's help. Over
the next two years, al-Qaeda cadres received extensive training in
preparation for what bin Laden called "global jihad." In the last
months of 1997, bin Laden told the Iranians that they should reconsider
their foreign policy and join his campaign against the United States and
its allies.
Mughniyah continued to train al-Qaeda cells during the early
years of the 21st century as the official policy adopted by Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei on the relationship with al-Qaeda was crystallized in a highly
classified document prepared by Iranian intelligence in May 2001. The
document stressed the importance of joint strategic objectives Between
Al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime in the "battle against global
arrogance led by the United States and Israel." The Middle East
magazine The Tower quoted the secret document as saying it was crucial to
understanding Mughniyeh's relationship with 2001 9/11 attacks in United
States.
The investigation committee found Mughniyeh and his top
aides accompanied eight of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks
when they left Saudi Arabia for Tehran through Beirut in late 2000. Ramzi
bin al-Shaibah, the link between the al Qaeda leadership and the hijackers,
received a visa from the Iranian embassy in Berlin in late 2000. He spent
the greater part of 2001 in Tehran.
After the attacks, Mughniyeh took over the travel of
al-Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan to Iran to protect them from the US
invasion on October 7, 2001. In addition to housing Ayman al-Zawahri and
al-Qaeda's military wing Saif al-Adl in Iran, Mughniyah took measures to
host many members of the bin Laden family. Mughniyah also used his global
network to turn most al Qaeda assets across Africa into gold and diamonds
in the months following the September 11 attacks.
By 2002, Mughniyeh was supporting Shiite and Sunni armed
groups throughout the Middle East under the guidance of the Iranian regime.
He was a mediator between the Iranian regime on the one hand and Hamas and
Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories on the other.
In the summer of 2006, Mughniyah attended a series of meetings
with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad in Tehran. By July of that year, three Israeli soldiers were
kidnapped in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah on the border with the Gaza
Strip and Lebanon. Mugniyah's relations with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and
the timing of the incidents indicate a degree of cooperation. From the
tactical point of view, the two incidents dragged the Israeli army into
military action on two fronts.
In February 2008, Mughniyeh was killed in a mysterious
explosion following a series of meetings with intelligence officials of the
Syrian regime in the region of Kafr Sousse in Damascus. The body
responsible for his assassination has been unknown for years. In January,
the Washington Post published an investigation into his death that was the
result of a joint operation between the CIA and Mossad.
In the wake of the killing of Mughniyeh, many of those
trained by him became senior leaders of the Hamas and Jihad movements in
the Palestinian territories. In Lebanon his disciples became the architects
of Hezbollah's strategy in Syria. In Iraq, the Shiite militias under his
supervision have become the tombstone of democracy.
In the meantime, the Sunni militias that Mughniyah helped
and embraced have turned into a global terrorist threat called the Islamic
State Organization. Mughniyah's cells in Europe were sending al Qaeda
jihadists from Europe to Iraq and Afghanistan during the first decade of
the 21st century. The same networks continued to enable foreign fighters to
travel to Iraq through Syria. These jihadists returned to Europe to carry
out terrorist attacks such as the Paris attacks and then the attack on the
offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine.
Analysts say finding solutions to this threat should not be
confined to the southern suburb of Paris or the poor suburb of Molenbeek in
Brussels, but should extend to Hezbollah's relationship to West African
diamond trade, drug trafficking networks in Latin America and many black
markets in Southeast Asia.
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