British diplomats are checking secret reports that elements within Iran, normally hostile to the West, helped the American secret services to capture Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the Kurdish-born senior al-Qaeda militant who was revealed last week to have been arrested on the border between Iran and Iraq late last year.
Abdul Hadi, 45, a former Iraqi army officer who speaks five languages and is a key link between the al-Qaeda leadership in western Pakistan and militants in Iraq, had 'met with al-Qaeda leaders in Iran' and had urged them to support efforts in Iraq and to cause 'problems within Iran', US military sources told The Observer
Elements within the complex matrix of interest groups that make up the Iranian regime, who have co-operated with Western intelligence services before when it has served their purposes, provided crucial elements of information, possibly through intermediaries, allowing Abdul Hadi to be captured. 'They may have felt he posed an equal threat to them,' said one Paris-based Middle Eastern diplomat yesterday. 'One of Tehran's biggest fears is of an alliance between Kurdish ethnic separatists in the northwest and al-Qaeda.'
Any such help would have been highly secret, given the tense relations between the Iranian regime and Western nations which came to a head with last month's detention of British naval personnel, allegations that Tehran is supporting Shia militants in Iraq and fierce recriminations over Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear technology.
However, senior US intelligence officials told The Observer that the Iranian government has 'in some cases' been helpful in tracking and 'disabling' key militants crossing their national territory between Iraq and Afghanistan. The key Egyptian militant Saif al-Adel, once in charge of training al-Qaeda's new recruits, and one of Osama bin Laden's sons are both believed to be under some kind of detention in Iran.
However, though such co-operation was relatively common in the years immediately following the 11 September attacks, the sources said, it had ceased more recently.
Though they refused to confirm that Abdul Hadi was picked up on the frontier with Iran, Pentagon officials said that he had been attempting to return to Iraq 'to manage al-Qaeda affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets'.
Regional governments have made no comment on the arrest, but Pakistan Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao described the arrest as a 'welcome development'. Senior British officials appeared unaware that Abdul Hadi had been detained by the CIA nearly six months ago, despite the militant's reported links to the London bomb plots and suspected interest in organising attacks on British soil. Intelligence services in the northern Iraqi cities of Arbil and Sulaimaniyah said Abdul Hadi, whose real name is Nashwan abd al-Razzaq abd al-Baqi, was well known to them.
Born in 1961 in the northern city of Mosul, Abdul Hadi - who is being held at Guantanamo Bay - is thought to have served in the Iraqi national army in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s before becoming involved in the Islamist groups active in northern Iraq's urban areas at the time. He is believed to have travelled to Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s to fight Soviet occupiers, fighting alongside the militia group of hardline local warlord Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf. As Afghanistan sunk into civil war in the early 1990s, Abdul Hadi is thought to have stayed in the region, based in the western Pakistan city of Peshawar, where he instructed recruits in Sayyaf's complex of training camps. One Pakistani source told The Observer he had taken at least one local wife from among the city's large population of Afghan refugees and had at least one son. Towards the end of the decade, Abdul Hadi gravitated towards bin Laden's al-Qaeda, becoming close to the Saudi-born terrorist leader and taking up a position on his ruling consultative council. In the late 1990s Abdul Hadi commanded a unit of international volunteers fighting alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud in the northeastern Afghan province of Takhar.
He became known to Western intelligence services during the battle of Shah-e-Kot in eastern Afghanistan in March 2002, when he is thought to have commanded the militants who inflicted heavy casualties on American troops and their Afghan auxiliaries in fierce fighting. A year later he is believed to have been appointed al-Qaeda's 'director of external operations', replacing Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 11 September attacks, who was arrested in Pakistan. 'It is the most exposed position in the al-Qaeda structure because it is the link with the outside world,' one British counter-terrorism official said. 'It's the job with the worst long-term prospects in the world.'
A document prepared by the UK's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre quoted Abdul Hadi as calling for an attack against the UK this summer, 'ideally before Tony Blair leaves office'. According to the document, he 'stressed the need to take care to ensure that the attack was successful and on a large scale'.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that Abdul Hadi had been one of the key targets of a series of bloody offensives by Islamabad's troops in the 'tribal territories' and was believed to be a direct link between al-Qaeda leaders and the Taliban and deeply implicated in organising attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan. He had disappeared some time during mid-2005, around when the Pentagon says Abdul Hadi had been posted as a key link between bin Laden and local Iraqi militants, but surfaced in a violent recruiting video apparently filmed in Afghanistan.
His capture came just weeks after the US State Department issued his photograph and offered £500,000 for information on his whereabouts.