Pompeo's Claim That Iran Is Collaborating With Al Qaeda is "EXAGGRATION"

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that Iran and Al Qaeda are collaborating is at best an exaggeration that is not supported by any available information, U.S. intelligence officers and officials with the State and Defense Department tell TIME.

Pompeo made the claim about the terrorist organization during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, at a time when tensions between the U.S. and Iran have risen.

“There is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qaeda. Period. Full stop,” he said. “The factual question with respect to Iran’s connections to al Qaeda is very real. They have hosted al Qaeda. They have permitted al-Qaeda to transit their country.”

But U.S. officials say that he dramatically overstated the case.

“The Secretary has blown the level of collusion between Iran and a few of the remnants of al Qaeda way out of proportion,” says a senior U.S. official who follows developments in Iran closely. “There have been occasional marriages of convenience, but there is nothing in the intelligence to suggest that any of them has been consummated in any grand anti-American alliance.”

Two intelligence officials say that while it’s true that a handful of al Qaeda members, including one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, have been in Iran since shortly after the U.S. attacked their safe haven in Afghanistan in 2001, there is no evidence that Shiite Muslim Iran and the Sunni extremist group have carried out any joint operations against the U.S.

To the contrary, three officials noted, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, al Qaeda’s direct descendant in Syria and Iraq, took credit for a 2017 attack on Iran’s parliament building and the tomb of the Islamic Republic’s founder, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which according to Iran’s state media killed at least 12 people.

That attack may have been prompted by the fact that Lebanon’s Hezbollah and other Shiite militias backed by Iran’s Quds Force, the overseas arms of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have battled al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and Iraq, said another U.S. official, who like the others requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

“There have been al Qaeda people in Iran since shortly after 9/11, occasionally under house arrest,” says Daniel Benjamin, who was the State Department’s top counterterrorism official during the Obama Administration and now director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

However, Benjamin tells TIME, Iran has not had an operational alliance with al Qaeda.

“The Iranians want to know what AQ is up to and they keep close tabs on them, but Iran’s current approach and one it’s maintained for many years has been to avoid anything that would provoke an American strike,” he says.