“Al Qaeda has a new home base – the Islamic Republic of Iran,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last night (Tuesday). He added that since 2015, Iran has allowed the leaders of the terrorist organization greater freedom of movement within the country, but did not provide real evidence, he said.
“Unlike in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda is hiding in the mountains, the organization now operates under the tough protective shell of the Iranian regime. “It is time for America and all the free countries to crush the Iran-al-Qaeda axis,” Pompeo said in a speech to the National Press Club. In his speech, he officially announced that al Qaeda official Abu Muhammad al-Masri, who was accused of involvement in attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, died in Iran last August, claiming that his presence in the country indicates that the organization’s leadership is currently concentrated there.
Reuters reports that the New York Times reported at the time that Masri had been killed by Israeli operatives in Iran – reports that Iran had denied, on the pretext that al-Qaeda had no “terrorists” on its soil. The Shiite state and the Sunni organization are on both sides of the Muslim barricade. “Iran and al-Qaeda are a kind of strategic enemy,” an analyst named Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington told Reuters. “Presenting a picture as if there is a strategic relationship between them is more a fiction than a fact.” Other experts say the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Iran is a known fact, but from then until the statement that all leadership is concentrated there – the distance is great.
“Mr ‘We lie, cheat, steal’ pathetically ends his disastrous career with more war-torn lies,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted. ‘No one is fooled. All of the 9/11 terrorists arrived from Secretary Pompeo’s favorite Middle Eastern destinations. None of them came from Iran. ‘
In addition, Pompeo said in his speech that the United States is offering a reward of up to $ 7 million to anyone who provides information to senior al-Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al-Maghrabi, who is hiding in Iran (in his remarks), and that sanctions have been imposed on a number of other senior members of the organization. Just a week before the White House is staffed by a new president, who wants to lower the flames with Iran and return to the nuclear deal in one form or another – the existing administration continues to try to make its mark, until the very last minute.