From the Council on Foreign Relations:
Iraq
Does Iraq sponsor terrorism?
Yes. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship has provided headquarters, operating bases, training camps, and other support to terrorist groups fighting the governments of neighboring Turkey and Iran, as well as to hard-line Palestinian groups. During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam also commissioned several failed terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities. The State Department lists Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism. The question of Iraq’s link to terrorism has become more urgent with Saddam’s determination to develop weapons of mass destruction, which Bush administration officials fear he might share with terrorists who could launch devastating attacks against the United States.
Was Saddam involved in the September 11 attacks?
There is no hard evidence linking Saddam to the attacks, and Iraq denies any involvement. However, it didn’t express sympathy for the United States after the attacks. Some Iraq watchers still suspect Saddam was at least indirectly involved, but by the fall of 2002, the Bush administration had stopped arguing that Iraq had strong links to al-Qaeda.
Does Iraq have ties with al-Qaeda?
The Bush administration insists that hatred of America has driven the two closer together, although many experts say there’s no solid evidence of such links and argue that the Islamist al-Qaeda and Saddam’s secular dictatorship would be unlikely allies.
Some Iraqi militants trained in Taliban-run Afghanistan are helping Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist militia that harasses anti-Saddam Kurds. In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council that Iraq was harboring a terrorist cell led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a suspected al-Qaeda affiliate and chemical and biological weapons specialist. Powell said al-Zarqawi had both planned the October 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan and set up a camp in Ansar al-Islam’s territory in northeastern Iraq to train terrorists in the use of chemical weapons. Powell added that senior Iraqi and al-Qaeda leaders had met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Czech officials have also reported that Muhammad Atta, one of the September 11 ringleaders, met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague months before the hijackings, but U.S. and Czech officials subsequently cast doubt on whether such a meeting ever happened. Al-Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have reportedly hid in northern Iraq, but in areas beyond Saddam’s control.
What type of terrorist groups does Iraq support?
Primarily groups who can hurt Saddam’s regional foes. Saddam has helped the Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist group fighting the Turkish government. Moreover, Iraq has hosted several Palestinian splinter groups that oppose any peace agreement with Israel, including the mercenary Abu Nidal Organization, whose leader, Abu Nidal, was found dead in Baghdad in August 2002. Iraq has also supported other Palestinian groups, including the Islamist Hamas movement, and reportedly channels money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam is a secular dictator, so his regime tends to support secular terrorist groups rather than Islamists such as al-Qaeda, experts say.
What are U.S.-Iraq relations like?
Hostile. That wasn’t always the case; in the 1980s, following the Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, the United States saw Saddam as a useful regional counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Indeed, when Iraq launched a long, brutal war against Iran in 1980, the Reagan administration provided Saddam’s regime with arms, funds, and support.
But U.S.-Iraq relations ruptured in August 1990, when Iraq invaded its tiny, oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait, prompting the United Nations to impose economic sanctions and eventually authorize war. In the winter of 1991, a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait but stopped short of ousting Saddam. After the war, the U.N. Security Council maintained economic sanctions on Iraq; established two “no-fly” zones patrolled by U.S. and British planes to protect Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south; and imposed international weapons inspections to prevent Saddam from rebuilding his arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.
The Clinton administration sought to contain Saddam with a mixture of sanctions and arms inspections but ultimately concluded that Saddam had to go. Today, Bush administration officials call Saddam’s regime an immediate threat to America—because of its history of attacking its neighbors, using chemical weapons, supporting terrorist groups, defying U.N. Security Council resolutions, and seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. In his first State of the Union address after September 11, President Bush said Iraq belonged to an “axis of evil.”
Has Iraq ever used weapons of mass destruction?
Yes. In the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi troops repeatedly used poison gas, including mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin, against Iranian soldiers. Iranian officials also accuse Iraq of dropping mustard-gas bombs on Iranian villages. Human Rights Watch reports that Iraq frequently used nerve agents and mustard gas against Iraqi Kurds living in the country’s north. In March 1988, Saddam’s forces killed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja with chemical weapons.
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