Iraqi documents, dating from January to May 1993, suggest that Baghdad’s
training of terrorists goes back over a decade - at least to the period
following Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That training was
interrupted by the 1991 war, but appears to have resumed not long
afterwards.
These documents, leaked by a Pentagon official to Scott Wheeler of Cybercast
News Service, are posted on its Web site. Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA
counter-terrorism official who worked on Iraq; MEMRI’s Nimrod Raphaeli;
Middle East scholar Walid Phares; and this author have all expressed their
confidence in the documents’ authenticity. They are on official Iraqi
letterhead and are essentially a 40-page correspondence between Iraqi
intelligence and Saddam’s office.
Responding to a request from Saddam, M-14, the division of Iraqi
intelligence responsible for training and conducting special operations,
produced a report dated April 1, 1993. The seven page document lists 100
“Arab fedayeen,” whom it had trained in Iraq during the fall of 1990.Their
nationalities include a wide swath of the Arab world: Palestinians, Syrians,
Lebanese, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Sudanese, and Eritreans, who are
not usually considered Arab.
One important relationship discussed in the documents is Iraq’s support for
the militant domestic opponents of the Egyptian government, a key Arab
member of the 1990-91 coalition against Iraq. Three weeks prior to the
Persian Gulf War, on December 24, 1990, Iraqi intelligence concluded an
agreement on a plan of sabotage against Cairo with a representative of the
Egyptian Islamic Group, whose leader, Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, was
subsequently tried and convicted for terrorism in New York. Those operations
ended with the February 28, 1991, cease-fire, according to these papers.