On Al-Qaeda, Iran speaks with forked tongue

Iranian leaders were quick to criticize the April 7, 2017 U.S. missile strike against a Syrian airbase near Homs, that followed dictator Bashar al-Assad's use of sarin gas against his own people. Iran's Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, claimed that the strike against their ally, Assad, was evidence of the "U.S. military fighting on [the] same side as al-Qaeda and ISIS." It was time, Zarif exhorted, to stop the "cover-ups." But it is the Islamic Republic of Iran that has a long, if seldom noted, history of boosting al-Qaeda, including the Islamic States' progenitor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

The evidence of al-Qaeda's relationship with Iran has been steadily building for years. In a recent report for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), terror analyst Assaf Moghadam highlighted the "tactical cooperation" between Tehran and the terror group.

According to Moghadam, ties between the Iran and al-Qaeda predate the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks "by roughly a decade." Current al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri secretly visited the Islamic Republic in April 1991. At the time, al-Zawahiri was head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that later merged with al-Qaeda. While there, al-Zawahiri requested—and received—Iran's help with the training of its terror operatives, as well as $2 million in financial aid from Tehran. Within less then a year, the agreement between al-Zawahiri and Iran was extended to include al-Qaeda and the Lebanese-based Shi'ite terror group Hezbollah, which often functions as a proxy for its Iranian benefactor.

As Kyle Orton of the Henry Jackson Society, a U.K.-based think tank, pointed out, Hezbollah's military leader at the time, Imad Mughniyeh, personally met with al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in Sudan to work out the details of their cooperation.

Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is a Shi'ite Muslim theocracy, this has not impeded it from working with and actively supporting terrorist groups of the Sunni Muslim variety, such as al-Qaeda or Hamas. The exponents of the two ideologies may be regional competitors for power, but this has not stopped them from making common cause against the "far enemy" of the United States, and its allies, including Israel.