Saddam’s connections with al Qaeda and bin Laden: Part III, Strange Bedfellows

Continued from Part II.

It’s true, Saddam and Bin Laden were strange bedfellows. Bin Laden called Hussein an “infidel”, Hussein imprisoned and executed thousands of Islamic clerics over his 35-year reign of terror.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that bin Laden and Hussein were not natural allies; it’s another to conclude that they’d never work together. Again and again I’m noticing the CIA’s incredibly rigid thinking.

A brief history of Saddam’s rule in Iraq demonstrates that he wasn’t above using Islam and the language and practices of the mujahideen when it suited his purposes. He actively supported the Syrian religious extremists in their efforts to overthrow Syrian despot Hafez al Assad, a longtime rival who had backed Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. In 1982, Assad brutally put down a rebellion in Hama led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic group opposed to his secular regime. Estimates of the death toll range from five thousand to twenty-five thousand. The group dispersed, with its moderate elements relocating to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and a number of European countries. The radicals, including several of the group’s leaders, moved to Iraq, where they were welcomed by Saddam Hussein. Syrian Muslim Brothers trained at the al Rasdiya camp outside of Baghdad.

According to US officials and press reports, one of the Syrians who spent time at the Iraqi camp is Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas. Yarkas, captured in Madrid in November 2001, was the leader of al Qaeda’s operations in Spain. The roommate of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in Germany, he was believed by Spanish and American authorities to have been directly involved in the planning and financing of September 11 attacks. Indeed, may leaders of the al Qaeda cells in Madrid and Hamburg, Germany–the cells that executed the September 11 attacks–are onetime Syrian Muslim Brothers.

There is no indication that Yarkas stayed in close contact with the Iraqi regime after he left in 1986. But some of the leadership of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood did. On May 5, 1998, Iraqi state-run television reported that vice president Taha Yasin Ramadan met with leaders of the Brotherhood in Baghdad. And as late as February 2000, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders spoke openly about their presence in Iraq.

When Spanish authorities seized documents from top al Qaeda operatives in Spain in November 2001, they found an invitation to a party at the residence of the Iraqi ambassador to Spain. The invitation was to Luis Galan Gonzalez, a spanish convert to Islam who worked for Yarkas, under Gonzalez’s al Qaeda nom de guerre, Yusuf Galan.

Saddam’s provision of safe haven to the group is insignificant on an operational level, as the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is not believed to have any significant attacks for years. But his tolerance of their presence in Iraq is one of the many indications that he was not as hostile to Islamic radicals as conventional wisdom suggests. Throughout the Iraq’s war with Iran, from 1980 to 1988, the Iranian clerics sought to present Saddam not only as an aggressor, but as an infidel whose words and actions were anticlerical and anti-Islam. To counter this criticism, Saddam made modest adjustments to his rhetoric, inserting religious praise and otherwise invoking Allah as he battled his neighbors.

Saddam further Islamized his image and his regime in the run-up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent War. At least rhetorically, Saddam went from an outspoken secularist to a fiery jihadist.

Amatzia Baram, currently a scholar at the US Institute for Peace, is perhaps the world’s greatest authority on Saddam Hussein. He has detailed Saddam’s transformation in dozens of articles and books, including an analysis published in the December 2000 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs.

President Saddam Hussein led the Ba’ath party in introducing some Islamic principles into the Iraqi legal system. This started a short while before the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when Saddam made it clear that whenever laws clashed with the divine Shari’a (Islamic law), the former must always give way. One day before the Allied bombing began the fighting in January 1991, Saddam Hussein added the slogan “Allahu Akbar” to the Iraqi national flag. During the war, Saddam’s rhetoric was fully Islamized in a way unparalleled by any other Arab secular leader.

Baram notes that Saddam undertook a wide-ranging public relations campaign to cast himself as an Islamic holy warrior. He frequently invoked past Islamic battles and rallied Muslims to his cause by claiming that he would return the Islamic world to glory by taking the battle to the Western infidels.

Following the Iraqi defeat in the war, there was no sign of a return to rational, secular rhetoric. Indeed, in 1994, when the economic embargo resulted in a serious inflating of unprecedented suffering among the vast majority of Iraqis, Saddam Hussein went further by introducing punishments such as severing the right hand for theft and the death penalty for prostitution, defining these penalties as Islamic. The Iraqi president also initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced and enhanced compulsory study of the Qu’ran at all educational levels, including in Ba’th party branches…it is impossible to guage the extent to which the “Islamization” steps helped the Iraqi president and his ruling elite stay in power by more effectively legitimizing them. It would seem, however, that such a far-reaching decision had to be based on a rational calculation that more emphasis on Islam would strengthen the regime’s popularity.

Part I here.

Part II here.