CAIRO, 7 February 2003 — US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim of an alliance between Baghdad and the Al-Qaeda terror network is weak, unsubstantiated and cannot justify war on Iraq, Arab commentators said yesterday.
Powell’s charges “are laughable, it’s a meager scenario made up by the United States to set the stage for war” on Iraq, said lawyer Muntasser Al-Zayat, who defends militants in Egyptian courts.
“There is no possible link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden,” he told AFP.
“Al-Qaeda is a fundamentalist organization, Iraq is secular. Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush represent exactly the same thing for Al-Qaeda: The enemy,” stressed Zayat, who has extensive experience of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad group, led by Bin Laden’s top aide Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Powell accused Iraq of harboring a variety of terrorists, including at least one senior member of Al-Qaeda, Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Afghan war veteran accused of ordering the murder of a US diplomat in Jordan last October.
“It’s the first time I have heard of Al-Zarqawi,” said Zayat.
Camille Tawil, an expert on Islamist groups, said in Al-Hayat daily yesterday that Jordanian intelligence was the source of most reports on Al-Zarqawi.
Tawil wrote in the London-based Arab newspaper that Al-Zarqawi “was probably in Iraqi Kurdistan,” and not in an area under Baghdad’s control, when the attack that claimed the life of US diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman happened.
“Powell made a mistake, he failed to back up his claim with evidence, his accusations are not convincing,” said Abdulbari Atwan, a pro-Iraqi journalist who interviewed Bin Laden in November 1996 in Afghanistan.
“The attempt to point to a relation between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda was the weak link in his speech and perhaps destroyed the credibility of the whole speech,” the journalist added.
“In all, Powell’s presentation was a lot of fat, but little meat,” said Atwan, managing owner of the London-based Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. (Agencies)
