Al Qaeda’s newleader Saif al Adel is under the protection of Iran

A United Nations team has determined that the new leader of al Qaeda is Saif al Adel — a longtime jihadi who has spent years operating in Iran under the protection of the Iranian regime.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden who took the helm of al Qaeda in 2011 after bin Laden was killed by the United States in Pakistan, was himself killed in a U.S. air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, last summer. The U.N.’s specialized monitoring team said this week that the “predominant view” of U.N. member countries is that Iran-based Adel “is now the de facto leader” of al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for 9/11 and many other deadly terrorist attacks worldwide and that his leadership is “uncontested.”

“But his leadership cannot be declared because of Al-Qaeda’s sensitivity to Afghan Taliban concerns not to acknowledge the death of … Zawahiri in Kabul and the fact of Saif al-Adel’s presence in the Islamic Republic of Iran. His location raises questions that have a bearing on Al-Qaeda’s ambitions to assert leadership of a global movement in the face of challenges from ISIS,” the team noted.

In trying to understand why Zawahiri’s death and Adel’s ascendance had not been announced by al Qaeda, the U.N. team said its member countries “flagged that al-Zawahiri’s evident presence in Kabul had been an embarrassment for the Taliban, which is seeking legitimacy as a governing authority, and that Al-Qaeda chose not to exacerbate this by acknowledging the death.” The U.N. team added that most member countries “judged a key factor to be the continued presence of Saif al-Adel in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This raised difficult theological and operational questions for Al-Qaeda.”

The FBI Most Wanted Terrorist poster for Adel says he is “an Iran-based al-Qaeda senior leader and a leader of the Hittin Committee, which governs and coordinates the group’s transnational activities.” The State Department has a $10 million reward for Adel. The bureau says the terrorist is “wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.” Adel also played a “central role” in the “Black Hawk Down” attack in Somalia.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced in January 2021 that “Al-Qaeda has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran. … We ignore this Iran and al-Qaeda nexus at our own peril.” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed in April 2021 that “a handful of Iran-based al-Qaeda leaders oversee al-Qaeda’s network.”

Further, a State Department’s terrorism report on Iran in December 2021 revealed that “Iran has allowed al-Qaeda facilitators to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran since at least 2009, enabling al-Qaeda to move funds and fighters to South Asia and Syria, among other locales.”

State Department coordinator for counterterrorism John Godfrey said at the time that “we remain deeply concerned about the fact that al-Qaida senior leaders continue to reside in Tehran, in and around Tehran, and that there has been facilitation of them that allows them to remain active as leaders within the al-Qaida global enterprise.”

Source: msn