Late last month, Foreign Affairs magazine ran a rather surprising article
from Seth Jones, the RAND political scientist and well-regarded scholar
of American military tactics, titled simply “Al-Qaeda in Iran.”
Surprising not for what the article reveals, but for what it fails to
fully analyze, and what it misses entirely. For one thing, I have a hard time understanding the first two words
of Jones’ piece, that the presence since 2001 of senior al-Qaeda members
in Iran has gone “virtually unnoticed.” For one thing, the topic has
been common knowledge and conversation fodder among counterterrorism
specialists for years, some of whom, like Leah Farrall wrote publicly
about Iran’s detention and harboring of al-Qaeda figures and historical
fellow-travelers. But as Jones hints (and Josh Foust explicitly lays out),
the U.S. government has in recent years taken increasing public action
to draw attention to the connection; in the summer of 2009 the Treasury
Department slapped sanctions
on Osama bin Laden’s son Sa’ad, as well as three other suspected
al-Qaeda members, stating clearly that Sa’ad and others were believed to
be in Iran. And last summer Treasury stepped up the pressure (and
rhetoric), designating six al-Qaeda figures for sanctions and publicly
accusing Iran of having forged a “secret deal”
with al-Qaeda, one that in the words of Treasury official David S.
Cohen allowed the terror group to “funnel funds and operatives through
[Iranian] territory.”
Digging into the details of the piece, I was disappointed to find
that, well, there aren’t very many of them. Jones only names a limited
number of people actually believed to be in Iran, including the figures
on what he terms al-Qaeda’s “management council” in Iran — Saif al-Adel,
Sulayman Abu Ghayth, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, and
Abu Hafs al-Mauritani — as well as Yasin al-Suri, who Jones calls an
al-Qaeda facilitator. While al-Suri and Abu al-Khayr aren’t exactly
household names, al-Adel, Abu Ghayth, Abu Hafs, and Abu Muhammad are all
long-time al-Qaeda figures, and the first three should be known to
anyone who has even given a cursory study to al-Qaeda’s history before
and after the 9/11 attacks (and again, their suspected presence in Iran
has long been noted by specialists and journalists alike).
The second major fault of this piece is that, despite having “culled
through hundreds of documents from the Harmony database at West Point;
perused hundreds more open-source and declassified documents, such as
the U.S. Department of Treasury’s sanctions against al Qaeda leaders in
Iran; and interviewed government officials from the United
States, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia” Jones doesn’t
acknowledge the widespread reports that circulated in 2010 that al-Adel, Abu Ghayth, and Abu Hafs had quietly been allowed to leave Iran.
While these reports may not be conclusive, the possible departure of
such key leaders from Iran seems to be too important of a data point to
simply ignore.
Moreover, last fall Mauritanian news sources suddenly reported that
the family of Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, whose real name is Mahfouz Ould
Walid, had been repatriated to Mauritania
and were being debriefed by Mauritanian officials. Admittedly, there
aren’t many people who make it a regular habit to peruse the Mauritanian
press. But this information was and is available online, and I
personally know a number of lay analysts and former intelligence
analysts who not only saw this information, but talked about it publicly
on forums like Twitter. It is one thing to allow personnel to travel
freely, but another altogether to give up the leverage gained by holding
on to an al-Qaeda leader’s family. However, because this information
does not make it into Jones’ article, its impact cannot be addressed.
Setting aside these concerns, Jones’ analysis of the relationship
between Iran and al-Qaeda falls short on other key points. While he
argues (and I agree) that “It would be unwise to overestimate the
leverage Tehran has over al Qaeda’s leadership” and that al-Qaeda “is no
Iranian puppet” Jones argues that in the event of an American or
Israeli attack, Iran could step up its material support for al-Qaeda and
“could turn to al Qaeda to mount a retaliation to any U.S. or Israeli
attack.”
This assertion smacks of contradiction, though no analyst can predict
the future hypothetical reaction of Iran and al-Qaeda to a hypothetical
U.S. or Israeli strike. But history lends this argument no credence,
and Jones gives no evidence to back up his own eventuality. While
al-Qaeda’s capabilities are open to debate, the organization has not
managed to even link itself to a successful attack against the West
since the 2005 London transport bombings. And al-Qaeda core has never
managed to stage an attack against Israel — though groups inspired by
al-Qaeda have succeeded in a limited fashion, while others paid a heavy price for their allegiance.
Moreover, while some believe al-Adel has played an increasing
operational role in al-Qaeda since 2010, major al-Qaeda plots in recent
years, including the 2009 New York Subway bomb plot and the 2010 “Dussëldorf Cell” plot in Germany involved senior al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s tribal areas. As Paul Cruickshank has detailed,
al-Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas have played a major role in
training foreign fighters and plotting attacks against the West even as
drone strikes decimated the group’s leadership, though this may change
following the deaths of crucially important figures like Attiyatullah Abu Abd al-Rahman.
Yet the point remains that al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iran have not been
essential players in plots against the West since 9/11, and Jones does
not show why this center of gravity would necessarily shift to Iran,
even if the Ayatollahs or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad decided that it should.
Despite the time I’ve spent directly critiquing Jones here, my point
here is not to attack him, but rather to show the importance of dealing
with al-Qaeda’s history, especially since 9/11, in analyzing what the
group may do next and how they will continue to operate in a post-bin
Laden world. While much of this is classified, there is still a
tremendous wealth of information in the open-source, and there is still
no substitute for careful unclassified research. And perhaps, from time
to time, you should check the Mauritanian papers.
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