Key Findings

A systematic examination of nearly 300 declassified documents in Arabic offers the following findings:

• Al-Qa‘ida views Iran as a hostile entity, a hostility that is evident throughout the documents examined for this study.
• The examined documents provide no evidence of cooperation between Al-Qa‘ida and Iran on planning or carrying out terrorist attacks.
• The presence of jihadis in Iran was out of necessity, not a result of strategic planning. Jihadis, including Al-Qa‘ida members, and their families as well as members of bin Ladin’s family fled Afghanistan to Iran following the 9/11 attacks and the resultant fall of the Taliban regime.
• Al-Qa‘ida perceived Iran as having adopted a relatively relaxed policy initially, allowing jihadis and their families to reside temporarily before processing many of them out in coordination with their home countries.
• However, when jihadis began to set up communications with entities outside Iran, thereby violating the terms of the security measures set by the regime, Al-Qa‘ida experienced a campaign of arrests and deportations.
• Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Al-Qa‘ida perceived Iran’s policy as one of detention/imprisonment, refusing to allow jihadis to leave Iran. Some jihadis managed to evade arrest and adopted stringent measures to maintain a clandestine presence in Iran.
• One Al-Qa‘ida document suggests that in 2004, Iranian authorities reached out and wanted to establish contact with UBL. This document suggests that Iranian officials wanted UBL to exert influence and pressure over Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s indiscriminate attacks against the Shia and their holy sites in Iraq.
• However, the declassified documents reveal that Iran was not the only state to have reached out to Al-Qa‘ida. One document written in 2011 suggests that British intelligence similarly reached out to Al-Qa‘ida, through Libyan jihadis residing in the United Kingdom, offering to withdraw from Afghanistan if Al-Qa‘ida undertook a serious commitment not to mount any attacks against Britain or its interests.
• Al-Qa‘ida viewed and used Iran as a passageway to smuggle people and money clandestinely. Al-Qa‘ida members entrusted with these secretive smuggling missions were trained to kill themselves if they feared being captured by Iranian authorities.
• Bin Ladin distrusted Iran. Letters he composed to his wife Umm Hamza, soon after her release from detention by Iranian authorities in 2010, highlight the extent of his distrust and make it evident that he had no close connections to Iranian officials.
• The documents reveal that Al-Qa‘ida was pragmatic in its efforts to secure refuge for or the release of its personnel and their families, and to facilitate the financing of its enterprise. They show that Al-Qa‘ida would have been prepared to cooperate with Iran on a transactional basis to secure the release of jihadis and their families detained by the Iranian regime. However, Al-Qa‘ida’s commitment to its own ideological principles, in particular its rejection of the legitimacy of the regimes of Muslim-majority states, including Iran, outweighed its willingness to collaborate with them at a more strategic level.