Expediency and betrayal: Iran’s relationship with al-Qaeda
Contrary to Trump administration assertions of Iranian support for al-Qaeda, relations between the two have historically been poor, a new report argues.
Iran and al-Qaeda had a largely hostile relationship and the Sunni jihadi group saw Shiite Iran as a “postponed enemy,” according to a new study of documents retrieved by US Special Forces during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.
President Donald Trump and members of his administration have sought to justify a tough new policy toward Iran in part by asserting that al-Qaeda is among the “terrorist proxies” backed by the Islamic Republic.
However, according to the study, “no evidence of cooperation … on planning or carrying out terrorist attacks” between Iran and al-Qaeda has emerged and the relationship was one of expediency on al-Qaeda’s part and calculation on Iran’s.
Many of the conclusions in the new study echo previous findings from documents released in 2012 by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point, which was given initial custody of the Abbottabad files. However, Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at the left-leaning New America think tank who previously served as a senior associate at the Combating Terrorism Center, has had access to additional information released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2015-2017 and nearly a half million other files made available by the CIA in 2017.
