“[Saddam] was one of the contemporary world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism. He harbored or funded some of history’s most infamous killers and jihadists, including the current chief of al-Qaeda, and plotted numerous terrorist attacks of his own, including an attempt to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush with a suicide bomb. Long before the U.S. invasion of 2003, his regime was formally identified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism,” writes the Post in a Sunday editorial.
Here’s more:
…multiple independent and bipartisan reports before and after the war have established beyond any doubt that Hussein was deeply enmeshed with terrorist activity from the time he took power in the late 1970s until the eve of his last war. Among the thugs he hosted in Baghdad were the Palestinian terrorists Sabri Banna or Abu Nidal, and Muhammad Zaidan (Abu Abbas); the latter was the leader of one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in history, the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro and murder of American Leon Klinghoffer. The conspirator who mixed the chemicals for the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, Abdul Yasin, found harbor in Baghdad, where he was paid a monthly stipend. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, spent most of 2002 in the Iraqi capital and received medical treatment there. According to captured Iraqi documents, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda, was funded by Iraq beginning in the late 1970s, when he led an Egyptian terrorist group. And the 9/11 Commission, among others, reported that Iraqi officials met numerous times with al-Qaeda and may have offered Osama bin Laden haven in 1999.
For a more complete and detailed list of the terrorists Saddam supported or harbored during his reign in Iraq, be sure to read Stephen F. Hayes’s own fact-check last week on Trump’s claim for THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
Saddam Hussein opposed terrorists who opposed him. He supported and funded virtually all others—including jihadists who targeted the United States, its interests, and allies. *As early as 1982, Saddam Hussein was openly supporting, training, and equipping the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group opposed to the secular regime of Hafez Assad. *In February 1993, Abdul Rahman Yasin mixed the chemicals for the first al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In the days after the attack, Yasin, an Iraqi national, was detained twice by the FBI. Although he offered investigators details of the plot, he was released—twice—on the assumption that he would be a cooperative witness. According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, Yasin promptly “fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance.” In 1994, a reporter for ABC News went to the home of Yasin’s father in Baghdad and spoke with neighbors who reported that Yasin was free to come and go as he pleased and was “working for the government.” So an Iraqi participant in an al Qaeda attack on the U.S. mainland fled to Iraq—with Iraqi government assistance—after those attacks. *Months later, in April 1993, Hussein dispatched a suicide bomber to attempt to kill former U.S. president George H.W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait. *Hussein was not coy about his support for anti-American terror. In a nationally televised speech that same year, he called for attacks on U.S. interests. “Attack them, our beloved people. You are the glory of our nation. Attack them.”
Read the whole thing here.
