London, Oct. 22 – Compact discs containing al-Qaeda’s training manuals and propaganda materials are being freely distributed in Iran’s eastern and southeastern provinces, according to local residents.
The instructions, all in Arabic, cover a wide range of political and ideological indoctrination, as well as offering detailed guidelines on military and security tactics, according to residents of the provincial cities of Mashad and Zahedan who have seen the CDs.
“They are easily available and cost nothing”, Gol-Mohammad Baremi, who lives in the southeastern city of Zahedan, told Iran Focus in a telephone interview. “But they can’t be for local people. Hardly anyone here speaks Arabic”.
Some security analysts suspect that the CDs could be part of the much larger stocks prepared for shipment to Iraq and other Arab countries.
“They are either being produced in Iran’s eastern provinces to be smuggled to Iraq, or they are being brought into Iran from Afghanistan and Pakistan, en route to Iraq”, Paramjit Gupta, a counter-terrorism specialist based in Dubai, said in a telephone interview. “The question, as always, is the degree of official Iranian involvement. Given the strong presence of [Iranian secret police] MOIS agents in these provinces, I imagine the government knows very well what’s going on”.
In July 2004, the presidentially-appointed commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States concluded that al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran was far deeper and more long-standing than had been envisaged before. The 9/11 Commission noted that as many as 10 of the hijackers transited through Iran before the hijackings.
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