Qaeda in Iraq but no Saddam ties

PV Vivekanand
FIGHTERS of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda group entered Iraq and had been behind some of the most effective attacks against US forces occupying the country after Saddam Hussein's ouster, but there is no evidence that the group had links with the ousted regime, intelligence sources said on Sunday.
The US is also seeking to step up pressure on Saudi Arabia by highlighting that some of them were from the Wahabi sect of Sunnis since that is the dominant group in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi royal family is also Wahabi.
The sources were commenting on reports from Iraq that nearly 20 people, including Saudis, Kuwaitis, Palestinians and Jordanians as well as Iraqis, who were detained following Friday's bombing outside Imam Al Mosque in Najaf, had admitted to being Al Qaeda members.
"It is doubtful that all of them were Al Qaeda members," said one source who spoke to Malayalamanorama on condition of anonymity. "Some them were driven into staging anti-US attacks on their own because of ideological and personal reasons while others were organised and under the Al Qaeda banner."
However, American officials say otherwise. They insist that Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime were linked and Friday's bombing was irrefutable evidence that the links are continuing.
At least two of the detainees were intelligence operatives of the Saddam regime, according to the reports.
The sources said the Ansar Al Islam group, which had presence in northern Iraq in an area beyond the control of the Saddam regime in Baghdad and cited by the US as the link between Saddam and Bin Laden, appears to be operating on its own.
Ansar Al Islam is one of the groups suspected to have carried out the Aug.19 bombing against the UN headquarters in Baghdad and an earlier attack against the Jordanian embassy in the Iraqi capital.
"To an extent it could be said that Ansar Al Islam is following the lines of Al Qaeda in post-war Iraq," said the intelligence source. "There might or might not be communications between the group and some of the Qaeda leaders in hiding after the Afghan war. It does not really matter since the danger is very much existent in Iraq with or without any Qaeda leadership role."
Ansar Al Islam is "one of the several groups that is engaged in hit-and-run attacks" against the Americans in Iraq, said the source.
"There are Saddam loyalists, remnants of the Baathist regime, independent Islamist groups which are dedicated to fighting the US because of what they see as Washington's bias against Muslims and others.
"The most dangerous among these are the Islamists and they pose a continuing threat to the US since it is not a specific group with a specific number of members; their number could run into thousands like the Islamic Jihad or Hamas groups of Palestine sicne they are driven by despair, frustration and fury over the American approach to the Palestinian problem as well as all Muslim issues."
According to the source, the Najaf blast served several purposes for whoever was behind it: Apart from throwing out of gear US efforts to pacify post-war Iraq, it eliminated the leading Shiite cleric in the south, Ayatollah Mohammed Al Baqr Al Hakim, who was advocating co-operation with the US forces occupying the country, it (could have) led to widening the deep schism between the Hakim camp and the group led to Moqdata Baqr who preaches a hostile approach to the US, and brought up many theories and suppositions that added more complexities to the chaos of Iraq.
Obviously, in the short term the Americans would like to use the purported Al Qaeda role in Friday's blast that killed over 100 to re-emphaise that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified since Al Qaeda had links with the Saddam regime.
Deliberately left to in the grey area is that Al Qaeda operations in Iraq today could not be cited as evidence that the ousted regime had links with it.
On the Saudi angle, it is clear that the emphatic reference in all statements that some of those arrested are "Wahabis" is another form of American pressure on Saudi Arabia after contenting that Arab guerrillas were entering Iraq across the 800-kilometre Saudi-Iraq border.
Riyadh has denied the charges, but the denial has done little to improve the worsening strain in relations between Saudi Arabia and the US since Sept.11, 2001.
Fifteen of those carried out the suicide hijacking were Saudi members of Al Qaeda and since then Washington has been building a steady case that the source for Al Qaeda funds was Saudis, including members of the ruling family and various charity organisations and groups linked to mosques.