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1992 : (HIZBALLAH, IRAN, BIN LADEN, AL QEADA) Bin Laden makes a proposal to the Shiite organization Hizballah that they set aside their differences to cooperate in a common objective of killing US troops stationed in Asia and Africa. - MSNBC

1990s early : (HIZBALLAH & AL QAEDA STILL LINKED) Testimony in the East Africa embassy bombings trial, concluded last year (2001), lays out connections between al-Qaida and the Iranian government, an unidentified senior Iranian religious leader and Iran’s most favored terrorist group, the Hizballah, during the early 1990s. - MSNBC

1990s early and mid : (AL QAEDA & IRANIAN OFFICIALS MEET) Specifically, the transcript of the trial shows that as early as 1998 the United States was aware that on “various” occasions during the early to mid-1990s, high-ranking al-Qaida members met with Iranian officials and that bin Laden himself met with the leader of its terrorist surrogate, the Hizballah, to “cooperate against the perceived common enemy,” the United States. Among the prosecutors’ revelations at the embassy bombing trials was that Iran and Hizballah provided weapons and weapons training to al-Qaida and its ally, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and that “Osama bin Laden and other ranking members of al-Qaida, stated privately ... al-Qaida should put aside its differences with Shiite Muslim terrorist organizations, including the government of Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hizballah, to cooperate” against the United States. Moreover, there was testimony that bin Laden met with Imad Mugniyeh, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that took more than 300 American lives in Beirut during the 1980s.- MSNBC

1992 - 1996 : (AL QAEDA'S SALIM, IRANIAN CLERIC, AL QAEDA, NATIONAL ISLAMIC FRONT OF SUDAN, IRANINA GOVERNMENT) The meetings between al-Qaida and the unidentified Iranian religious leader took place in Sudan with Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, bin Laden’s former financial manager, representing al-Qaida. They took place at “various times” between 1992 and 1996, according to prosecutors. All the meetings apparently took place in Sudan. According to U.S. prosecutors, “At various times between in or about 1992 and in or about 1996, the defendant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum as part of an overall effort to arrange a tripartite agreement between al-Qaida, the National Islamic Front of Sudan and elements of the government of Iran to work together against the United States, Israel and other Western countries.” Salim goes on trial in New York early next year, and it is expected that details of those dealings will be made public.

1994 : (BIN LADEN & IMAD MUGNIYAH MEET) The bin Laden meeting with Mugniyeh, the military chief of Hizballah, was held in 1994. The meeting apparently took place in Sudan.

1996 : (MOGADISHU TERRORIST 'SUMMIT,' HIZBALLAH, BIN LADEN) According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers.

1990s late : (AL QAEDA & TALIBAN ATTACK IRANIANS) But there is also significant evidence that al-Qaida worked with the Taliban in anti-Iran operations in the late 1990s and in at least one case, even before that.

1999 (RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IRAN AND AL QAEDA APPEAR TO DETERIORATE) Historically, there appear to have been exploratory talks and some action involving Iranian officials and al-Qaida years ago, but there also is evidence of a deterioration and outright hostility between the two sides by the end of 1999.

This is primarily directed at Destro:

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on my remarks on the Shi'ite-Sunni alliance. Iran is even now helping al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself and is providing VIP treatment to at least two of the group's top leaders.

"What a winning new term for Bosnian Muslim apologists whose lies about a true genocide have long been exposed as false. No Christian in the Balkans could ever live under Muslims, especially Muslims and Croats that had once killed them using SS uniforms."

Regarding the World War 2 antics of the Ustashi and the Muslim SS units, I would point out that the Ustashi were or at least claimed to be Catholic (and I'm Catholic as well, so this is hardly an attack on Catholicism), abeit the kind with an extreme anti-Orthodox bent to them. However, the actions of the Ustashi and the Muslim SS in no way justify the actions of such charming Serbian paramilitaries as the Sivi Vukovi, Arkan's Tigers, or the White Eagles. Things simply aren't as cut and dry as that when it comes to the Balkans.

As far as the use of my term genocide-lite, according to FAS, for example, Arkan's Tigers killed around 1,400 Bosnian Muslims between April and May of 1992 in Bosnia. That's a lot worse than anything say ... Robert Mugabe's done in Zimbabwe and most people have no problem considering the man a monster. So why does Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") get a free pass and Mugabe is hung out to dry?

Regarding the al-Qaeda office in Zagreb, it belonged to the Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Office), which predates the establishment of al-Qaeda by nearly a decade and was originally formed for the purposes of transporting mujahideen to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Maktab al-Khidamat also had at least twenty different offices INSIDE the USA well into the early 1990s. After the Afghan War, Maktab al-Khidamat and other such groups became the nucleus for bin Laden's shadow army, but this wasn't discovered until several years later.

I have no doubt that al-Qaeda maintained a front office in Zagreb or that it sent troops to Bosnia. The fact that Iran did the same is likewise unsurprising. However, there is no evidence that the Croatian government was aware that they were planning to establish the Islamic World Empire or that the Croatians thought that such an outcome would be a good thing for the Balkans.

The link to the BBC story you provided is posted at Rense.com, a conspiracy theorist website. Even if I assume the story is genuine, this doesn't do much for your credibility. Oplan Bojinka, the brainchild of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was considered to be the work of an isolated group of Middle Eastern extremists. At the time that Oplan Bojinka was busted, the threat was considered thwarted. When Yousef himself was arrested in Pakistan, he never divulged his connections to either al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. It wasn't until 1998 that US intelligence recognized that they had severely under-estimated al-Qaeda's capabilities. We still did after 1998, in fact.

The State Department's terrorist profile, for example, says that al-Qaeda may have "anywhere between several hundred to several thousand members." Well, we've KILLED several thousand and the group is still alive and kicking and planning new attacks, as what happened in Yemen yesterday illustrates. It looks like we under-estimated them again, but hey, hindsight is always 20-20.

Regarding your Karadzic quote, I would point out that the US has been opposed to Serb policy in Bosnia for several years at that point, just as it had been opposed to the Pakistani policy on Kashmir. So Karadzic's quote, while no doubt accurate, was probably filed under "ignore" just like Sheikh Kabbani's warning years earlier that over 80% of the mosques in America have been infiltrated by "extremists."

"Yea, no one knew in the CIA knew that the 'Bojinka' in Project Bojinka is a Serbo-Croatian word."

They likely did, but Ramzi Yousef spoke at least a dozen languages. Serbo-Croat was simply his flavor of the week for that operation.

"The CIA must have too busy looking the other way while the Iranians were using Croatia's good offices to transport jihadists and weapons to the Bosnian Muslims to make a connection in 1993 and again in 1995 why an Arab terrorists with plots to blow up airplanes and the World Trade Center was using a Bosnian (i.e Serbo-Croatian) word as the code word for his plots?"

The CIA likely assumed (and there are still members of the lidless eye brigade who refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of an al-Qaeda-Iranian alliance) that the Shi'ites and the Sunni could never cooperate. It's the same reason the CIA didn't share intelligence on who all was at the al-Qaeda summit in Maylasia with the FBI.

Oh and to piasa, if al-Qaeda and Iran ended in 1999, where exactly is Saif al-Adel (al-Qaeda's military commander) right now?