A recent article, “Al-Qaeda’s American Spring,” in the Syrian news daily Tahwra al Wehda, pointed out that al-Qaeda, always having been financed by the Wahhabi regime of the House of Saud, is now being transported from Yemen and the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders to Syria, to fight against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. What the Syrian daily did not include is that the transportation of these terrorists to Syria has the blessings of the Obama and Cameron administrations.

The article identified the role of the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in this new move: “The House of Saud has, exclusively, provided the financial, political, religious and media support for al-Qaeda. This support is emboldened specifically with the new political role of Bandar bin Sultan after becoming the head of Saudi intelligence.”

Over many decades, particularly since 9/11, the Saudi role on behalf of the British, the Zionists, and a degenerated US leadership, has been to kill Muslims - both Sunnis and Shias. This is the only way the House of Saud, highly unstable within Saudi Arabia, could continue its decrepit leadership in that country. In other words, by serving the interests of the colonial and neo-colonial forces, the House of Saud survives.

Britain + House of Saud = al-Qaeda

There is no dearth of evidence that al-Qaeda, the mighty Sunni terrorist group, whose prime target is the Shias, was and is financed by the House of Saud at the behest of Britain, if not the United States and Israel. The propaganda machine, Western in particular, has tried in vain to perpetuate the myth that the recently eliminated creator of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was an enemy of the House of Saud, since he was banned from entering Saudi Arabia after he had attacked US installations.

But the real story is altogether different. Osama’s al-Qaeda had always been financed by the House of Saud and its lackeys within Saudi Arabia. It was for this reason that, following the 9/11 attacks that killed more nearly 3,000 individuals, Washington finally moved in to close down some of the bank accounts that the Saudis used to finance Osama’s terrorist outfit. But those closures were more show than substance. The House of Saud has many other ways to get money to the terrorists and they are using them today, whether Washington’s security people admit it or not.

Osama had long been a British asset, to say the least. In 1999, the French Parliament commissioned a thorough investigation of global money-laundering. After publishing reports on Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Switzerland, it produced a report titled The City of London, Gibraltar and the Crown Dependencies: Offshore Centers and Havens for Dirty Money, with an addendum titled “The Economic Environment of Osama bin Laden.” The report concluded that up to 40 British banks, companies, and individuals were associated with bin Laden’s network, including organizations in London, Oxford, Cheltenham, Cambridge, and Leeds.

In introducing the report, Arnaud Montebourg, a French Member of Parliament, concluded: “Tony Blair and his government preaches around the world against terrorism. He would be well advised to preach to his own bankers and oblige them to go after dirty money... Even the Swiss co-operate more than the English.” [1]

The British protection of Osama began long before 1999, however. Late in 2001, Saudi-based journalist Adam Robinson, in his book Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist, drew from interviews with Osama’s immediate family, and gave a detailed account of bin Laden’s three months in England at the beginning of 1994.

Bin Laden’s London Base

Upon arriving, bin Laden bought a house on, or near, Harrow Road in the Wembley area of London, Robinson wrote. He paid cash, and used an intermediary as the named owner. Bin Laden’s most important task was setting up his organization, the Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC), to disperse his press releases and to receive donations. After bin Laden left, a fellow Saudi “dissident,” Khaled al-Fawwaz, ran the ARC from London, keeping in touch with bin Laden by phone, and distributing his statements to the many Arabic newspapers based in London.

Bin Laden also established relations with two London residents who were crucial to crafting his image as an international spokesman for, and mastermind of, the militant Islamist movement over the years. The first was Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and the other was radical cleric and Muslim Brother Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, who called himself “the voice of Osama bin Laden” and directed the extremist Islamic Liberation Party and the al-Muhajiroun organization out of his London mosque.[2]

Omar Bakri Mohammad was also instrumental in developing another Blair-protected terrorist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), in Britain. HuT later worked hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists to establish a strong presence in the “stan” countries of Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, and Turkmenistan), and in northern Lebanon. The HuT, like the House of Saud, preaches Wahhabism and trains Wahhabi-indoctrinated terrorist killers. A number of “stan”  countries have banned the HuT, but it still lurks in the shadows and is growing, posing an increasing threat to Russia’s southern flank and fulfilling the British, if not American, geopolitical objective.

What tasks did Osama have to carry out for the British to secure the privilege of Britain’s empire crowd? In order to understand that, one has to look at the British policies toward oil-rich Libya, which were put in motion soon after the defeated Soviet military left Afghanistan in 1989. The British empire crowd had been looking longingly to gain control of Libya, and its oil, for years. But, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was stable and was keeping most of his countrymen content.

The attempt to assassinate Qaddafi

In 1996, British saw an opening when a Libyan military intelligence officer approached Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, with a plan to overthrow Qaddafi, according to former MI5 officer and whistle-blower David Shayler.[3] The Libyan, codenamed “Tunworth,”  proposed establishing links with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organization formed in Afghanistan in 1990 from around 500 Libyan jihadists then fighting the Soviet-backed government.

One former senior member of the LIFG, Norman Benotman, who first went to Afghanistan as a 22-year-old in 1989, later said in an interview that during the Afghan War, his mujahideen commander was Jalaluddin Haqqani, and that he and fellow militants had benefitted from British training programs: “We trained in all types of guerrilla warfare. We trained on weapons, tactics, enemy engagement techniques and survival in hostile environments. All weapons training was with live ammunition, which was available everywhere. Indeed, there were a number of casualties during these training sessions. There were ex-military people amongst the Mujahideen, but no formal state forces participated. We were also trained by the elite units of the Mujahideen who had themselves been trained by Pakistani Special Forces, the CIA and the SAS... We had our own specially designed manuals, but we also made extensive use of manuals from the American and British military.”

Nota bene: Benotman is an associate of Tony Blair. When the British people clamored to get the Hizb ut-Tahrir banned, Blair, using taxpayers’ money, created the Quillam Foundation, whose supposed “job” was to identify terrorist groups functioning within Britain. The foundation was stocked with “former” terrorists who were deployed to work for the MI6. As a result, HuT continues to grow within, and beyond, Britain.

In addition, Benotman’s mujahideen commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is none but the founder of the Haqqani group which is killing American soldiers in Afghanistan, while allegedly sheltering itself within Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Haqqani has had a long history with Saudi, American, and Pakistani intelligence agencies. During the Afghanistan jihad against the Soviets, he was one of the favored commanders and received millions of dollars from the West and the Saudis, as well as Stinger missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, explosives, and tanks. He became close with Osama bin Laden during the jihad and after the Taliban took control he served as minister of tribal affairs in its government. According to some, it is Jalaluddin Haqqani who introduced suicide bombing in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

The attempt to assassinate Qaddafi by the British, using Osama’s people, failed. Annie Machon, Shayler’s partner and a former MI5 officer, writes that, by the time MI6 paid the money to Tunworth, bin Laden’s organization was already known to be responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and MI5 had set up G9C, “ a section dedicated to the task of defeating bin Laden and his affiliates.” This is significant in light of Britain’s toleration of bin Laden’s London base - the Advice and Reformation Committee - which would not be closed down for another two and a half years.

US intelligence sources later told the Mail on Sunday newspaper that MI6 had indeed been behind the assassination plot and had turned to the LIFG’s leader, Abu Abdullah Sadiq, who was living in London. The head of the assassination team was reported as being the Libya-based Abdal Muhaymeen, a veteran of the Afghan resistance, and thus possibly trained by MI6 or the CIA. A smattering of other media investigations confirmed the plot, while a BBC film documentary broadcast in August 1998 reported that the Conservative government ministers then in charge of MI6 gave no authorization for the operation, and that it was solely the work of MI6 officers.[4]

One other fact that needs to be stated here is Washington’s implicit involvement, by looking the other way while their “best allies” across the Atlantic were using the “most wanted” terrorists. The Libyan al-Qaeda cell that the MI6 and Blair were using included Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government’s most wanted list, with a reward of $25 million for his capture.

But this despicable and morbid episode does not end here. Two French intelligence experts, Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, the latter an advisor to French President Jacques Chirac, revealed in their book Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden (2002), that the first Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden was issued by Libya in March 1998. British and US intelligence agencies buried the fact that the arrest warrant had come from Libya and played down the threat. Five months after the warrant was issued, al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[5]

The House of Saud, Zionism, and the British

The importance of the House of Saud to the British cannot be understood fully without looking back at the historical role that King Abdulaziz bin Saud (Ibn Saud) played in helping Britain and France to divide up the Ottoman Empire by means of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and also in bringing the Zionists into Palestine. When the British Empire picked up Ibn Saud, leader of the Wahhabi sect, to become the “Keeper of Two Holy Mosques,” it was in a way the fulfillment of Empire’s plan. The Hashemite dynasty, which claims the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad, was the strongest traditional Arab force, but its back was broken when Ibn Saud threw them out of Mecca and Medina. In their “pity,” the British then put the Hashemites Abdallah bin al-Hussein and Faisal bin Hussein in place as rulers in Jordan (1921) and Iraq, respectively. Faisal was briefly proclaimed King of Syria (1920), and ended up becoming King of Iraq (1921).

In the subsequent period, both Iraq and Syria chucked out these religious leaders and, to the chagrin of the British Empire, were taken over by sectarian political parties. It is no surprise then that, with the help of the Americans, the British were deeply involved in efforts to overthrow both these leaders and bring them under indirect control - such as now exists in Bahrain - of the House of Saud. It should be noted that when Ibn Saud was just a desert-based Bedouin, with no wealth to boast of, it was the British Empire that funded his conquest of all of Arabia.

On the other hand, by picking up a desert-roaming Bedouin and putting him in charge of “the Two Holy Mosques,” Britain bought itself a horde of serfs. And Ibn Saud delivered quickly, by welcoming the Zionists to the Arab world! The British groundwork for determining the destiny of Ibn Saud, and the House - or rather the Tent - of Saud, was done by the intrepid British intelligence officer Gertrude Bell. In 1919, at the Paris Conference ending World War I, Bell argued for the establishment of independent Arab emirates for the area previously covered by the Ottoman Empire. The Arab delegation, which was actually under Bell’s control, was led by Faisal Saeed al-Ismaily, a Bedouin Sunni steeped in the orthodox version of the religion, born in Taif (now, Saudi Arabia), the third son of the Grand Sharif of Mecca.

On Jan. 3, 1919, Faisal and Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation, in which Faisal conditionally accepted the Balfour Declaration, based on the fulfillment of British wartime promises of development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, on which subject he made the following statement: “We Arabs ... look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.... I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized people of the world.”

Even today, the House of Saud’s allegiance to the Zionists who have massively displaced the Palestinian population remains intact. That is why the House of Saud deploys its Wahhabi-indoctrinated terrorists against the Shia Muslims as their prime target. While it is true that the orthodox Sunnis, and only the orthodox Sunnis of extreme variety, do not accept the Shias as Muslims (and hence they ostensibly do not violate killing of Muslims which Prophet Muhammad had strongly warned against), there could be another reason why the Shias are targeted. To begin with, Britain has had its problems with Iran, a civilization that would not kowtow to the British Empire the way the Bedouins did. Secondly, after Iraq was virtually decimated by the Bush-Cheney-Obama crowd following 9/11, Iran has remained the only active backer of the Palestinians.

New Role for the House of Saud

In recent years, the House of Saud has been assigned a new “job” by Britain, and the so-called 1% in the United States who have trashed the American republic and adopted the Empire’s method of making money. These Americans have greatly benefitted by becoming Britain’s partner in reaping the proceeds of drug money that is laundered by offshore banks, most of which are located in former British colonies. Since such “benefits” cannot be accrued without yielding to what the Empire-promoters demand, Washington, under Bush and Obama, has become as much a partner of the despotic colonial practices as Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron.

The Taliban project goes back a few decades. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the “free world” got together to push the Red Army back and smack the Russian bear. Money flowed into Afghanistan from the West and the Persian Gulf, with the intent of protecting the sovereignty of Afghanistan, preserving Islam, and crippling the Communists.

During the 1980s, Saudi-funded radical Pakistani madrassas (seminaries) had pumped out thousands of Afghan foot soldiers for the US- and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviets. They also helped bind the independent-minded Pushtun tribesmen closely to the Pakistani government for the first time in history, easing the acute insecurity that Pakistan had felt with respect to Afghanistan and the disputed border.

It is hardly a secret that rich Saudis, including those running the government, have used their considerable oil wealth to spread political and ideological influence throughout the world. One need look no further than the close-knit relationship between the House of Saud and the Bush family to understand the Saudis’ powerful reach across the globe. In Muslim countries, though, its presence is more explicitly ideological. Indeed, since 9/11, it has become increasingly clear that Saudi money frequently makes its way into the hands of Islamic extremists.

As Afghanistan plunged into civil war in the 1990s, the Saudis began funding new madrassas in Pakistan’s Pushtun-majority areas, near the Afghan border, as well as in the port city of Karachi and in rural Punjab. The Pakistani Army saw the large number of madrassa-trained jihadis as an asset for its covert support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as its proxy war with India in Kashmir.

While in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP), bordering Afghanistan, and the gateway to the famed Khyber Pass, madrassas supplied both Afghan refugees and Pakistanis as cannon fodder for the Taliban, the Binori madrassa and others associated with it formed the base for Deobandi groups (not too distant from the Wahhabi), such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which sought to do the Pakistan Army’s bidding in Kashmir. The many Ahle-Hadith seminaries supplied Salafi (Wahhabi) groups, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Arab sheikhs funded madrassas in the Rahimyar Khan area of rural Punjab, which formed the backbone of hard-core anti-Shi’ite jihadi groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba, and its even more militant offshoot, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

All these groups shared training camps and other facilities, under the aegis of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Saudi and Gulf petrodollars encouraged a Wahhabi jihad-centered curriculum at the madrassas. Prominent madrassas included the Darul Uloom Haqqania at Akora Khattak in the NWFP and the Binori madrassa in Karachi. The Haqqania boasts almost the entire Taliban leadership among its alumni, including top leader Mullah Omar, while the Binori madrassa, whose leader Mufti Shamzai was assassinated, was once talked about as a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden; it is also reportedly the place where bin Laden met Mullah Omar to form the al-Qaeda-Taliban partnership.

The House of Saud worked hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda in setting up these madrassas. For instance, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki bin Faisal, who had taken over the General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Riyadh’s main intelligence service, in 1977 and headed it until 2001, had known bin Laden since 1978. Bin Laden became one of the linchpins of the GID’s funding policy toward the ISI and anti-Soviet warfare in Afghanistan, and he met with Turki several times in Islamabad. Many years afterward, in 1998, when bin Laden had already become engaged in an anti-American crusade, Turki allegedly requested his extradition from Taliban leader Mullah Omar, but was not successful.

Madrassas: Poison Them Young

In 2007, former US Ambassador to Costa Rica Curtin Winsor, in an article for Global Politician,[6] pointed out that while Saudi extremists remain the vanguard of Islamic theofascism around the world, the growth potential for this ideology lies outside the Kingdom. “The Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad during the past two decades, and the scale of financing is believed to have increased in the past two years as oil prices have skyrocketed. The bulk of this funding goes to the construction and operating expenses of mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions that preach Wahhabism. It also supports the training of imams; domination of mass media and publishing outlets; distribution of Wahhabi textbooks and other literature; and endowments to universities (in exchange for influence over the appointment of Islamic scholars). By comparison, the Communist Party of the USSR and its Comintern spent just over $7 billion propagating its ideology worldwide between 1921 and 1991.”

From an astonishing cable published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn,[7] however, it would seem that significant sums of Saudi money are fostering religious radicalism in previously moderate regions of Pakistan. The cable, dating from late 2008, paints an unsettling picture of wealth’s powerful influence in those underdeveloped areas of Central Asia in need of the most attention. Bryan Hunt, then-principal officer at the US consulate in Lahore, reported a string of troubling findings from his forays into southern Punjab, where he “was repeatedly told that a sophisticated jihadi recruitment network had been developed in the Multan, Bahawalpur, and Dera Ghazi Khan Divisions.”

The cable describes ways in which recruiters exploit families with multiple children, particularly those facing severe financial difficulties in light of inflation, poor crop yields, and growing unemployment in southern and western Punjab. Often these families are identified and initially approached/assisted by ostensibly “charitable” organizations including Jamaat-ud-Dawa (a front for the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba), the Al-Khidmat Foundation (linked to the religious political party Jamaat-e-Islami), or Jaish-e-Mohammad (a charitable front for the designated foreign terrorist organization of the same name).

Wahhabi proselytizing is not limited to the Islamic world. The Saudis have financed the growth of thousands of Wahhabi mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions in many non-Islamic countries. Wahhabi penetration is deepest in the social welfare states of Western Europe, where chronically high unemployment has created large pools of able-bodied young Muslim men who have “become permanent wards of the state at the cost of their basic human dignity,”  according to the cable.

The House of Saud’s madrassa project is very active in South Asia as well. According to 2004 reports, the Saudi Embassy in New Delhi was pushing India’s Human Resource Development Ministry and Minorities Commission to set up new madrassas in India, and the Saudi Royal Family has cleared plans to construct 4,500 madrassas in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka at a cost of $35 million, to promote “modern and liberal education with Islamic values.”

Notes

[2] “The Muslim Brotherhood: The Globalists and the Islamists,” Veil of Politics, Jan. 31, 2011.

[3] “Britain, Qadafi and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,” Aug. 17, 2011, an extract from Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2010.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Martin Bright, “MI6 ‘halted bid to arrest bin Laden’,” The Observer, Nov. 10, 2002.

[6] Amb. Curtin Winsor, Ph.D., “Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni Theofascism,” Global Politician, Oct. 22, 2007.

[7] Michael Busch, “WikiLeaks: Saudi-Financed Madrassas More Widespread in Pakistan Than Thought”, Dawn, May 26, 2011.

The author is South Asian Analyst at Executive Intelligence Review