Iranian Tip-Off May Have Led US To Al Qaida Leader

By Cernig

Tell your favorite freeper this one this weekend - then watch their head explode.

Iran helped the US by fingering the newly (not really- 6 months ago) captured Al Qaida leader they are all crowing about!

British diplomats are checking secret reports that elements within Iran, normally hostile to the West, helped the American secret services to capture Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Kurdish-born senior al-Qaeda militant who was revealed last week to have been arrested on the border between Iran and Iraq late last year.

Abdul Hadi, 45, a former Iraqi army officer who speaks five languages and is a key link between the al-Qaeda leadership in western Pakistan and militants in Iraq, had 'met with al-Qaeda leaders in Iran' and had urged them to support efforts in Iraq and to cause 'problems within Iran', US military sources told The Observer

Elements within the complex matrix of interest groups that make up the Iranian regime, who have co-operated with Western intelligence services before when it has served their purposes, provided crucial elements of information, possibly through intermediaries, allowing Abdul Hadi to be captured. 'They may have felt he posed an equal threat to them,' said one Paris-based Middle Eastern diplomat yesterday. 'One of Tehran's biggest fears is of an alliance between Kurdish ethnic separatists in the northwest and al-Qaeda.'

The Observer article also holds the debunk for the current dearly-held meme that Abdul Hadi, having at one time served in the Iraqi army, proves a connection between Saddam and Al qaida in the lead up to Bush's invasion.

Born in 1961 in the northern city of Mosul, Abdul Hadi - who is being held at Guantanamo Bay - is thought to have served in the Iraqi national army in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s before becoming involved in the Islamist groups active in northern Iraq's urban areas at the time. He is believed to have travelled to Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s to fight Soviet occupiers, fighting alongside the militia group of hardline local warlord Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf. As Afghanistan sunk into civil war in the early 1990s, Abdul Hadi is thought to have stayed in the region, based in the western Pakistan city of Peshawar, where he instructed recruits in Sayyaf's complex of training camps. One Pakistani source told The Observer he had taken at least one local wife from among the city's large population of Afghan refugees and had at least one son.

The rest of the article makes clear that he was in Afghanistan and Pakistan all this time.

Pakistan...again? But they're an ally!

Can. Not. Com. Pute!