Iran gives al-Qa’ida safe harbour, says Mike Pompeo

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has accused Iran of setting up a base for al-Qa’ida.

Mike Pompeo arrives at the National Press Club in Washington on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has accused Iran of setting up a base for al-Qa’ida, opening a new front in the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” ­offensive against Tehran.

Mr Pompeo used a speech in Washington to outline what he said was new intelligence on the long and complex relationship between Iran and al-Qa’ida’s leaders, several of whom are known to be based inside the country.

He said the new axis developing was a “massive force for evil” in the world.

“Iran is the new Afghanistan as the key geographic hub for al-Qaeda,” Mr Pompeo said. “Iran has given a new operational headquarters to the network.”

He said the situation was worse than in Afghanistan at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001, when the US was able to use targeted strikes to weaken al-Qa’ida. “Now these thugs are buried deep inside Iran,” he said.

Mr Pompeo has led President Donald Trump’s hardline response to Iran, championing the reimposition of sanctions and the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 ­nuclear deal. The accusation over the regime’s ties to al-Qa’ida is ­another challenge to the incoming Biden administration, which has promised to renew the deal.

The speech came 36 hours after Mr Pompeo designated the Iran-supported Houthi rebel movement in Yemen a “foreign terrorist organisation”.

Yemen is another country where Mr Biden has vowed to overturn Trump policy, saying he will suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless it ends its involvement in the war there.

The relationship between Iran and al-Qa’ida is not new, as Mr Pompeo acknowledged. After 9/11 and the offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan, some al-Qa’ida leaders fled to Iran, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family. Papers found in bin Laden’s home in Pakistan when he was killed in 2011 revealed that several of the group’s leaders had stayed in Iran, at times under house arrest. Others had leeway to liaise with its international network.

Two deputy leaders — both Egyptians, like its present chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri — have been known for years to have been based in Iran: Saif al-Adel, the group’s chief military strategist, and Abu Mohammed al-Masri, who is thought to have been killed in August. He was wanted by the US in connection with the bombings of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Al-Masri is said to have been killed on the US’s behalf by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Mr Pompeo said that at the time some commentators ­described the link between al-Qa’ida and Iran as “surprising”.

Al-Qa’ida is a Sunni Muslim group to which Iran, a Shia theocracy, is supposed to be virulently hostile.

However, Mr Pompeo said that would be to ignore ­increasing signs of close co-operation. Although he did not give details of the “new intelligence”, he said it showed that Iran had decided in 2015, at about the time the nuclear deal was signed, to make its support for al-Qa’ida ­official. He said Iran had helped the group with logistics, such as passports, and announced sanctions on individuals he said were al-Qa’ida operatives based in the country.

However, the speech was a barely veiled appeal to Mr Biden not to seek a rapprochement with Iran, pointing out that the US was bound, not least under UN resolutions, to keep sanctions on any entity that supported al-Qa’ida.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Mr Pompeo’s accusations were “warmongering lies”.

The Times