IRAQ, IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA ARE PAYMASTERS OF PALESTINIAN TERROR
By Kenneth Timmerman*
Tel Aviv (Insight) Even as President George W. Bush and CIA Director George Tenet lay out the evidence of Iraq's operational ties to al-Qa’eda terrorists, new documents seized by Israel from Yaser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and other terrorist operational centers in the West Bank show in extraordinary detail how Iraq has been funding terror and mayhem against Israeli civilians during the last two years.
According to the CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl, citing captured documents provided by the Israelis, Saddam's closest deputy, Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan, personally had signed checks made out to Palestinian terrorist leaders who had organised suicide-bombing attacks.
Since dropping that bombshell, the Israelis have analysed and offered to reporters hundreds of pages of documents that detail Iraqi money transfers and operational orders to what they now call an Iraqi "terror industry" in the West Bank and Gaza. The evidence is so overwhelming it appears almost mundane.
Captured documents include ledgers of "martyrs" who have carried out suicide operations against Israel, showing how much and when each was paid and the number of the check. It includes internal memoranda, computer disks, hard drives, videotapes and bank statements. In many cases the Israelis managed to seize checkbooks showing the stubs of these payments; in others, they have the actual wire transfers from Iraq.
In a signed, handwritten letter, Iraqi Vice President Ramadan explains in detail how clandestine Ba'ath Party cells in the territories should be organized and designates the Arab Liberation Front as the main "payment contractor" of the Iraqi regime, an Israeli analysis of the documents states. Ramadan reiterates Iraq's eagerness to use Palestinian suicide-bomb attacks to help achieve "the complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea," a familia r code-phrase meaning the destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian Arab state.
"We knew all of this many years ago," chief analyst Reuven Ehrlich told Insight as he displayed hundreds of pages of letters, reports, bank statements and lists that showed payments to suicide bombers and their families by Iraq in recompense for murder. "But, until now, the proof has all been classified top secret or above. Now we can finally release the evidence to the public."
" It's not the first time they have ignored hard evidence of Iraqi misdeeds in their eagerness to rehabilitate the Iraqi dictator", Ehrlich pointed out, referring to both the United Nations and the European Union unwillingness to pay attention to the seized documents.
Iraq used the Arab Liberation Front and the Ba'ath Party in Palestinian-controlled areas as "payment contractors". Another organisation, the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), headed by Mohammad Zaydan (aka Abu Abbas), was used by Iraq "as an operational tool for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel".
The PLF is the group that hijacked the Italian Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1986, tossing wheelchair-bound U.S. citizen Leon Klinghoffer overboard simply because he was a Jew.
In a rare intelligence scoop, the Israelis managed to capture active members of the PLF who confessed to having traveled to Iraq for military training. "Here you have a case where you have the documents, and then the individuals actually described in the documents", Ehrlich told Insight, which reviewed some 350 pages of Iraq-related documents in both English and Arabic, in addition to hundreds of pages more on financial aid from Saudi Arabia and direct military assistance from Syria and Iran. The evidence of their involvement in Palestinian terrorist operations is massive, direct and overwhelming.
From hard drives took out of computers confiscated at Palestinian offices, thousands of pages of documents soon spewed forth, laying out in extraordinary detail a money trail leading from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq directly into the pockets of commanders responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocents people killed on buses, in pizzerias, in discotheques and in shopping malls as well as in the streets.
"Each country has its own modus operandi, its favorite groups. The Iraqis work directly with the terrorist cells. The Iranians go through Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The Saudis have been at the game much longer and are much more careful to cover their tracks. They use a whole series of apparently charitable organisations, so they claim that their money has been funding human needs and social services, not terror", Ehrlich added.
Once Operation Defensive Shield was launched in retaliation for the Passover massacre that killed 29 Israelis on March 27, the Iraqis made a conscious decision to step up payments to the families of suicide bombers "in order to encourage suicide attacks", the documents show.
The Iraqis maintained a hierarchy of mayhem when handing out financial rewards to the families of dead terrorists. Until the Passover bombing in March, the families of suicide bombers were paid $15,000, whereas "ordinary" martyrs got $10,000. Realizing that more money meant more attacks, the Iraqis later upped the price for a "quality" suicide operation to $25,000, the equivalent of several years' wages for an average worker there.
The documents show the Iraqis also distinguished between suicide bombers who successfully carried out their missions and those who blew themselves up without killing Jews. In the warped economy of terror, failure has a price greater than death.
According to the captured documents, often, Palestinian groups themselves appeal directly for the Iraqi grants. In one such case, the Ramallah district office of Fatah issued an official declaration on June 17 certifying that one of its members successfully had carried out a suicide-bombing attack. "The Fatah movement in Ramallah and al-Bireh hereby declares that the martyr Amer Muhammad Issa Shakukani is one of the Intifada al-Aqsa martyrs, who committed suicide during a suicide attack by exploding a car bomb in the Tel Aviv area on 24 May 2002".
Captured bank statements of the Iraqi groups showed they had received more than $9 million in direct payments from Iraq during the last two years, with the effect of dramatically escalating the violence. In Arab press accounts, the Iraqis boasted of having spent more than twice that amount to support and promote "martyrdom" attacks.
The captured documents also make it dramatically clear that Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) not only winked and nodded at the Iraqi terror payments but also actively encouraged them.
"The Palestinian Authority, for its part, enables the Iraqi regime to freely operate in the PA areas via the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Ba'ath Party", an Israeli military-intelligence analysis states. "It cooperates with Iraq in providing aid to the families of killed and suicide terrorists and enables Iraq to freely disseminate the propaganda messages of the Iraqi regime [hostile to Israel and to the United States] in Palestinian society and media."
When the Israelis released the first set of captured documents seized from PLO offices and "charity" centers earlier this year, Yaser Arafat and his PA initially cried foul. "No longer", says Ehrlich. "Now they are demanding that we return the documents to them".
The United Nations and the European Union criticised Israel harshly in April for "reoccupying" Palestinian towns and refugee camps it had evacuated under the Oslo process. But the direct correlation between the Israeli military presence in Palestinian areas and the lack of successful terrorist attacks is overwhelming. "When we go in, we disrupt their networks", one Israeli intelligence officer said. "When we leave, they come back. It's as simple as that". ENDS IRAQI PALESTINIAN TERRORISM 161102
Editor’s note: A noted analyst and expert on Middle Easter and Arab affairs, Mr. Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine that published the above report.
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