The U.S. Treasury Department dropped a bombshell today when it sanctioned four al Qaeda operatives known to be operating in Iran. Osama bin Laden’s son Sa’ad along with Mustafa Hamid, Muhammad Rab’a al Sayid al Bahtiti, and Ali Saleh Husain have been designated as terrorists under Executive Order 13224. All four men serve on al Qaeda’s Shura Majlis, or executive council. Mustafa Hamid’s dealings with Iran, which the Treasury provides great detail, are especially interesting. A senior U.S. military intelligence official who tracks al Qaeda told me that Hamid is both “al Qaeda’s emir of Iran” and “al Qaeda’s ambassador to Iran.” Here is how the Treasury described Hamid:
The “arrests” were made after the 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were directly traced back to al Qaeda’s network in Iran (Sa’ad was involved the planning of this attack.) But the arrests were merely window dressing, as noted here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD back in 2005. Incidentally, in June 2008, the Treasury confirmed this when it sanctioned three al Qaeda financiers who operated from Iran and moved freely throughout the Middle East and South Asia well after 2003. Not only has the Treasury linked Iran to al Qaeda, but it has linked the group to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Back in October 2007, the Treasury sanctioned the Qods Force, the special operations branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for providing “material support to the Taliban, Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).” Hamas and Islamic Jihad are also Sunni terror groups. We’re constantly told that Shia Iran and Sunni al Qaeda would and could never cooperate due to the ideological differences between the two sects. But the Treasury, whose information is valuable in understanding al Qaeda’s global network, shows this is patently false.
