For the folks who worked the intelligence directorate at U.S. Central Command, recent revelations about cooperation between Iran and Sunni jihadi groups — via data collected on the Osama bin Laden raid and presented at an ongoing terrorism trial — are nothing new.
Though the cooperation between the Sunni jihadis and Shia Iran seems counterintuitive to the current narrative that exists regarding Iranian relations with groups like Islamic State in particular — in that they are quite mortally opposed — people in Tampa have long known of a relationship between the traditional intra-religious adversaries based on expediency and the old adage about the enemy of my enemy.
As far back as 2004, the directorate, known as the J-2, was tracking the flow of high value Sunni jihadis into and out of Shia Iran, says Jim Waurishuk, a retired Air Force colonel living in Dover who served as Centcom’s deputy director of intelligence for Centcom at MacDill Air Force Base from 2004 to 2007.
The result, as outgoing Pentagon spokesman (and St. Petersburg native) John Kirby would say, is that dozens of high value bad guys from al-Qaida and its affiliates have been schwacked as they tried to zorch their way in and out of Iran.
Waurishuk won’t say how Centcom gathered the intelligence that led to the schwacking, just that it worked.
In addition to providing the Taliban with tactical-level arms like machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and the like, Iran played a much bigger role with jihadi groups, says Waurishuk.
“Iran provided safe haven for fighters coming from all around the Middle East and North Africa to go to Afghanistan and the Pakistan border region,” says Waurishuk.
Some even wound up training in Pakistan, says Waurishuk, and then wound up back in Iran before shipping off to the rest of the region.
Aside from al-Qaida central, as run by the now-dispatched bin Laden, Waurishuk says the list of the schwacked included members of al-Qaida in the Maghreb, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab and al-Qaida in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State.
“We were able to track a lot of those guys coming in and out of Iran,” he says, adding that the information gathered was used to capture or kill the targets — usually mid-level commanders, sometimes higher-level leaders — all over the region.
While declining to name names for security reasons, Waurishuk says “those were the guys who were filling Gitmo.”
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There were about a million documents and files captured during the May 2011 Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and according to the Weekly Standard and other news organizations who were in court during the trial of al-Qaida operative Abid Naseer. Naseer is accused along with others, including Najibullah Zazi, of trying to carry out a series of attacks in the U.S.
Few of the million documents and files captured during the bin Laden raid have been made public, but eight documents presented at Naseer’s trial in Brooklyn show that the link between Iran and Sunni jihadi groups, established by Waurishuk and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community back in the mid-2000s, was still in effect by the time bin Laden was schwacked, according to the Weekly Standard.
The Iran-Sunni jihadi relationship was, like so many things in the region, dysfunctional, according to the documents presented in court, as per the Weekly Standard, which also reports that the relationship continues.
The reason, says Waurishuk is simple.
Sunnis and Shia may hate each other, but they hate the U.S. more. Which explains why Iran, through proxies like the Houthis in Yemen, are battling al-Qaida and taking direct action against Islamic State, but still support Sunni jihadis, other than Islamic State, when possible.
And why not.
.
“Iran is using its relations with al-Qaida to kill us and they don’t care how many of them get killed in the process,” Waurishuk says.
For Centcom and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, tracking Sunni jihadi group interactions with Iran had many positive outcomes, but one ultimate goal, says Waurishuk.
Killing bin Laden.
“If you look at it in the grand scheme of things,” he says, “the goal and target since day one was to get him.”
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The U.S. has the world’s best trained, best equipped and most capable special operations forces. In a way, we take that for granted.
But that’s not the case worldwide.
Nigeria, for instance, which has been unable to contain the horror that is Boko Haram, last month formed its Army Special Operations Command.
Where U.S. special operations forces number just shy of 70,000 all told, the newly formed Nigerian Army SOF is starting to train two battalions — between 1,200 and 1,600 men, Nigerian Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Sani, Chief of Transformation and Innovation for the Nigerian army told me.
The Nigerians, who already have a Special Boat Service, are being guided by Special Operations Command Africa, Sani told me last week in between sessions at the Global SOF Foundation Symposium.
“I met with Linder to fine tune our collaborative partnership activities,” Sani said.
The next step in the battle against Boko Haram is creating a regional response, said Sani, “so anywhere Boko Haram moves and touches, it touches all of us.”
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Speaking of commandos, the future of U.S. military participation on the ground in the fight against Islamic State will likely be lead by special operators, whether it be raids against high value targets, calling in airstrikes against enemy targets, conducting other special reconnaissance or hostage rescue attempts.
That’s what President Barack Obama told Congress when he asked for war powers authorities to continue the fight against Islamic State and its offshoots wherever they are. The importance of special operations, as I have often written, can also be found in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Defense Strategic Guidance and in Obama’s request for a global contingency fund.
Given all this, it was a real honor to take part in a discussion of the future of media-special ops relations, held last week during the symposium.
Especially so since the other panelists were among the world’s most knowledgable journalists covering SOF. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a reporter and author who recently announced he was leaving The Washington Post; Sean Naylor, who writes for Foreign Policy and is about to release “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command,” which I hear will send shock waves through the community; and Kevin Maurer, who co-authored, among his many other works, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden.
As the only reporter who has U.S. Special Operations Command and Special Operations Command Central, both headquartered at MacDill, in my geographic coverage area, I spend a lot of time dealing with the public affairs offices at both commands and really have no complaints. I have been able to write about a great deal of commando issues taking place in Tampa, like the Care Coalition, Preservation of the Force and Family initiative, the Joint Special Operations University, what’s now the J-3I international special ops center and of course the so-called Iron Man suit. I also write a lot about the Socom budget and other political and fiscal challenges facing the command.
The main thing I suggested was opening up opportunities to embed with SOF units who are part of the train and advise missions in Iraq and Syria, realizing there are many more voices that need to weigh in besides the two MacDill-based special operations headquarters (including Centcom).
Knowing the trepidation many commandos feel about having reporters among them, I said that for me, it was all about trust. Very hard to earn, easy to blow. I always liken covering this world to fly fishing for rainbow trout, which will disappear in a flash if approached the wrong way.
As Chandrasekaran so astutely pointed out, at a time of diminishing budgets, having commandos tell their story benefits them as well.
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The Pentagon announced no deaths in the ongoing operations in the Centcom region.
As Dan Lamothe pointed out in the Washington Post, this is the longest period without a U.S. troop death in a combat zone since 2001.
There have been three U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and none in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.