Ansar Al-Islam - Alleged Links To Saddam Hussein

Alleged Links To Saddam Hussein

In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration claimed that Ansar al-Islam had links with Saddam Hussein, attempting to establish a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda.

The Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq concluded that Saddam "was aware of Ansar al-Islam and al-Qa'ida presence in northeastern Iraq, but the groups' presence was considered a threat to the regime and the Iraqi government attempted intelligence collection operations against them. The DIA stated that information from senior Ansar al-Islam detainees revealed that the group viewed Saddam's regime as apostate, and denied any relationship with it." The leader of Ansar al-Islam, Mullah Krekar, has also called Saddam Hussein his sworn enemy.

Furthermore, in a "Special Analysis" report dated July 31, 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded the following regarding alleged connections between Saddam's regime and Ansar al-Islam:

"Should regime support to Ansar al-Islam be proven, this will not necessarily implicate the regime in supporting al-Qa'ida. Ansar al-Islam is an independent organization that receives assistance from al-Qa'ida, but is not a branch of the group. The Iraqi regime seeks to influence and manipulate political events in the Kurdish-controlled north and probably has some type of assets in contact with Ansar al-Islam, either through liaison or through penetration by an intelligence asset."

However, in February 2003, then United States Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council, "Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000 this agent offered Al Qaida safe haven in the region. After we swept Al Qaida from Afghanistan, some of its members accepted this safe haven." The general consensus of experts, as well as the conclusion of the intelligence community and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is that Saddam was infiltrating the group but that the two parties remained hostile to each other and did not establish a collaborative relationship.

Colin Powell has since acknowledged that his speech presented no hard evidence of collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda; he told reporters at a State Department press conference that "I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed." However, after Powell left office, he acknowledged that he was skeptical of the evidence presented to him for the speech. He told Barbara Walters in an interview that he considered the speech a "blot" on his record and that he feels "terrible" about assertions that he made in the speech that turned out to be false. He said, "There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me." When asked specifically about a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection, Powell responded, "I have never seen a connection. … I can't think otherwise because I'd never seen evidence to suggest there was one."