By Syed Kamran Mirza  

For all these years after 9/11 tragedy I was always telling my peers that though it was orchestrated by Osama’s grand terrorist team al-Qaeda—there must have been at least some sort of supports (Direct or Indirect) from other Muslim countries, especially Iraq and Saudi Arabia .  Why not? The famous universally true proverb could not be untrue! Which is: “Enemy of the enemy is my friend indeed”.  Undoubtedly, America has humiliated Saddam’s regime most, hence America has become the enemy #1 of Saddam. On the other side, Osama Bin Laden already declared America the enemy #1. Therefore, 1+1=2, Osama + Saddam= (become good buddies) Great enemies of Kafiir America —the great Satan. Even a child of 10 year can guess this equation.  Mysterious question is—why then 9/11 commission failed to understand this simple equation?  

With this above universally true perception, American public in general immediately suspected Saddam and Osama for the 9/11 incident. This was the only factor why the national poll on justification of Bush’s Iraq invasion—poll never came down below 70% even until a few weeks before 2004 election. About a few days before the election when Bush was suffering heavily by media’s lambasting, his poll on Iraq invasion still remained above 50% surprisingly.    

The 9/11 commission was formed mostly by some aggressive senators from Democratic Party, some from Republican Party and a few non-partisan American citizen. After almost year-long investigations the commission concluded that—al-Qaeda was purely stateless and never had any connection with the American enemy #1 Saddam’s Iraq . But world knows for sure that al-Qaeda was operating their heinous terrorism right from the lap of Taliban Afghanistan . Question is how then al-Qaeda was stateless?    

Let us judge some prudently relevant incidences: 

1) According to intelligence relayed in the famous Douglas Feith memo to Congress revealed by the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (now the Number 2 in the al-Qaeda hierarchy) paid a visit to Baghdad and immediately met with Iraqi Vice President Ramadan on February 3, 1998.  According to the Feith memo, "the [stated] goal of the visit was to arrange for the coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in Falluja, Nasiriya, and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz." This visit went well - very well. Saddam's intelligence service in essence cut a check directly to Zawahiri, for $300,000.

2) After he received Saddam's payout, Zawahiri immediately folded up his tent and irrevocably merged his organization with bin Laden's.  "The merger was de facto complete by February 1998," the 9/11 Report states.

 Zawahiri most likely used it to fund the merger costs: to regularize the training and indoctrination of jihad recruits and to jump-start the new project initiatives of al-Qaeda.   

3) Dr. Zawahiri had always enjoyed the reception Saddam gave him. He had already met Saddam personally six years earlier, in 1992, to plot terror. But in 1998, within a month of Saddam's payout and Zawahiri's merger with bin Laden, Saddam suddenly started ramping up his collaboration with al-Qaeda. 

4) The 9/11 Report states, "In March 1998, after Bin Ladin's [Commission spelling] public fatwa against the United States , two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one or perhaps both of these meetings were apparently arranged through Bin Ladin's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis."
 
 5) One way to exact the proper revenge was to keep the money flowing to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Former Iraqi intelligence officer Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, now in a Kurdish jail, told Jonathan Schanzer of the Weekly Standard that he personally was an aid conduit to Ansar al-Islam on Saddam's orders. Ansar al-Islam is, of course, an al-Qaeda affiliate that was badly bombed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We gave them money every month or two, Shamari recounted, noting that "on one occasion we gave them 10 million Swiss dinars [about $700,000]." Shamari's immediate boss was high-ranking Saddam loyalist and Mukhabarat officer Abu Wael. Saddam used Ansar al-Islam to make trouble in the pro-Western Kurdish north of Iraq , Shamari explained. Mullah Krekar, the spiritual head of Ansar al-Islam, while protected by the government of Norway, actually admitted to ABC News that Abu Wael "is an Arabic member of our shura, our leadership council also."

7) And, of course, there was always Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi is to this day writing letters to Osama bin Laden begging for cash to fund his bombings of Iraqi and coalition targets inside Iraq . One of these was intercepted en route via courier and published by Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer on the Web site of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But Zarqawi didn't show up in Iraq out of a seething but justified sense of outrage over the U.S. occupation. Before the Iraq War, Zarqawi had his own camps in northern Iraq , where he made poisons. He was a ricin specialist, according to Colin Powell in his February 2003 address to the U.N. Security Council. 

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