Iran Is Found To Be a Lair of Al Qaeda

I find this article particulary interesting because it matches the geographic location of what my friends who live in the city of Mashhad (Eastern Iran) have been telling me all along for over 4 years. They even mentioned a few citing of Osama himself in that city. I never really believed them until today. Some tid bits:

WASHINGTON — One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

That is a consensus judgment from a final working draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate, titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland," on the organization that attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The estimate, which represents the opinion of America's intelligence agencies, is now finished, and unclassified conclusions will be shared today with the public.
The classified document includes four main sections, examining how Al Qaeda in recent years has increased its capacity to stage another attack on American soil; how the organization has replenished the ranks of its top leaders; nations where Al Qaeda operates, and the status of its training camps and physical infrastructure...continue reading

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Al-Qaeda group threatens Iranians

The Daily Telegraph: THE leader of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Iraq has vowed to attack Iranians unless Iran cuts off its support for the Iraqi government within two months.We announce it today, our hands will not stay far from you," he said.

He did not say whether the group would mount attacks inside Iran.

Baghdadi said his group's decision is the result of Iran's support for its fellow Shiite Muslims in Iraq, and accused Tehran of being behind the burning of Sunni Muslim mosques and killings of Sunni leaders.

"We have prepared four years for this war, and all that remains is to give the orders," he said.

In May, Iraq's Interior Ministry said Baghdadi had been killed, but the group denied his death in a web posting.

Baghdadi said the ultimatum covers financial organisations and banks in Iraq that deal with Iran, without elaborating.
He warned Sunni businessmen against doing business with Iran and urged Arab states to denounce the Iraqi government.
"We give a precious chance to all countries that host the rejectionist Persians to issue a statement of condemnation denouncing the crimes committed by the rejectionist government (of Iraq)," he said.
Sunni Islamists often refer to Shiites as "rejectionists".
"They will be safe from our attacks if they do so within two months."

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IRAQ: ARMED GROUPS TARGET CHRISTIANS IN BAGHDAD

Baghdad, 10 May (AKI) - An armed Iraqi group has in recent days begun targeting Christians in the residential al-Doura neighbourhood of Baghdad, according to an interior ministry source quoted by the pan Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat. Information obtained during probes and the interrogation of various terror suspects arrested last week indicate that this group is linked to al-Qaeda and is made up of 200 militiamen, most of them foreigners. [...]

"Thousands of Christian families are being told to leave the country or convert to Islam or pay the jizyah (a tax traditionally imposed on non-Muslim men in Islamic states)," said the parliamentarian, Romeo Hakkari, an ethnic Assyrian of the Chaldean Church - a Roman Catholic oriental rite denomination.According to Hakkari, who heads the House of the Two Rivers Democratic Party, which promotes the rights of Assyrian-Chaldeans, many Christians living in Mosul and Baghdad have fled those cities and sought refuge either in remote parts of Iraqi Kurdistan or abroad after receiving threats from Islamists.

He cited the example of pamphlets, purportedly distributed by the al-Qaeda-linked "Islamic State of Iraq" group that threatened to kill Christians if they did not abandon the city.

The Muslim extremists have also tried to revive the jizyah practice, which forced non-Muslism people "of the Book" (Christians and Jews) to buy protection from the authorities by paying the tax.
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Iraq's Christian community was estimated to number nearly half a million or about 5 percent of the country’s population on the eve of the 2003 US-led war that toppled Saddam.

Thousands of Iraqi Christians who comprise a variety of churches - Assyrian Orthodox and Assyrian Catholic; Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholic; Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic; Greek Orthodox, Latin Catholic, and Protestant denominations - have since fled the strife-torn country.

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