Canada Plot Revives Concerns about Ties Between Iran and al-Qaeda

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced on Monday that it disrupted a plot to derail a VIA passenger train travelling from New York to Toronto.  “Had this plot been carried out, it would have resulted in innocent people being killed or seriously injured,” said Assistant RCMP Commissioner James Malizia.

Canadian officials added that the plotters had “direction and guidance” from al Qaeda members in Iran. “This is the first known al Qaeda planned attack that we've experienced in Canada,” Superintendent Doug Best told reporters.

These revelations will undoubtedly raise questions about the relationship between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda.  This relationship is not new, but some basic points are worth reviewing:

• The U.S. government’s first criminal indictments of al Qaeda in 1998 specifically alleged that the two were conspiring against their common enemies as a result of an agreement they reached in the Sudan in the early 1990s.
• Two al Qaeda members who became key witnesses in the U.S. government’s investigation of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania revealed that Iran and Hezbollah showed al Qaeda how to commit exactly that type of attack. This was later confirmed by the 9/11 Commission.
• The 9/11 Commission’s final report in 2004 discussed the ties between Iran and al Qaeda at great length. One section of the report, “Assistance from Hezbollah and Iran to al Qaeda,” discussed evidence suggesting that the Iranian regime may have even assisted the 9/11 hijackers in their travels.
• After the 9/11 attacks, the Iranian regime sheltered al Qaeda members, including the families of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. The Iranian regime also allowed some members of al-Qaeda to operate on its soil.
• In 2003, after the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq, the Iranian regime placed some senior al Qaeda leaders under a form of house arrest, but others operatives in Iran continued to operate a facilitation network supporting al Qaeda’s operations in South Asia and the Middle East.
• The Obama administration has recognized al Qaeda’s Iran-based facilitation network in a series of Treasury designations. The designations were released in July 2011, February 2012, and October 2012. Washington has also offered rewards for information leading to the capture of key al Qaeda members based in Iran.
• The leader of al Qaeda’s network inside Iran today is a Kuwaiti named Muhsin al Fadhli, who reportedly had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and was involved in the 2000 USS Cole bombing.
• Some al-Qaeda operatives slated to take part in an attack on European cities in 2010 subsequently received safe haven inside Iran after their plot was discovered.

The information provided by the RCMP and the FBI in the coming days may contribute to our incomplete knowledge of the ties between Iran and al-Qaeda. But even if it doesn’t, the troubling questions about this relationship begs for further analysis.

Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense Democracies.