Following the Terror Trail

Christopher Brown connects some dots on al Qaeda and WMD:

One key was that Abu-Hafs al-Masri, a.k.a. Mohammed Atef, in the role of military commander (a position analogous to the secretary of defense for al Qaeda, i.e. number 3), was personally in charge of al Qaeda's efforts to gain a WMD capability. Bin Laden himself, sometime in the early 1990s, added this duty to the position. In fact, Atef's predecessor, Abu-Ubaydah al-Banshiri, was on a mission to procure material for a dirty bomb — possibly part of the embassy-bombing plot originally planned for 1996 but delayed until 1998 — when he drowned in Lake Victoria in May of 1996.

Atef's personal oversight of al Qaeda's WMD programs means that Zarqawi, as the commander of al Qaeda's WMD training camps in Afghanistan (where the videos of choking dogs were filmed), would have reported directly to Atef. Zarqawi would likely have been assigned to this post personally by Atef. This could indicate that Zarqawi was not only a direct subordinate of Atef's in al Qaeda's WMD program but might have been Atef's prodigy.

Following Atef's death in November 2001, Abu Zubaydah became the military commander until his capture in Pakistan on March 28, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed then assumed this position until his capture in March 2003. During this time Saif al-Adil, who took the place of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Zarqawi were in Tehran under the protection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Zarqawi is believed to have remained in Iran until sometime in late October 2002, when he was involved in the killing of a USAID official in Amman.

Interestingly, a former member of the Iraqi intelligence services, Haydar al-Shammari, claimed that his commander Col. Abu-Wail ordered him to aid al Qaeda members fleeing from Afghanistan to enter Iraq through Jordan and Syria, where they joined up with Ansar al-Islam. This included experts in explosives, car bombs, and chemical weapons. This might explain why Zarqawi entered from Jordan rather than Iran.

This is why keeping nukes out of North Korean and Iranian hands is so important---terror states can easily farm out terror capabilities to terrorist groups. Iran and Syria have likely been doing just that with al Qaeda, as did Saddam Hussein.