What's Behind a Sinister Flirtation

By Romesh Ratnesar

For months now, America's most powerful argument for invading Iraq has been its least persuasive one: the allegation that an alliance exists between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell attempted last week to explain the basis of the Administration's often befuddling certainty. In his speech to the U.N., Powell presented the most specific case yet that there exists a "sinister nexus," as he put it, between Iraq and bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

Did he prove it? Powell certainly demonstrated a flirtation between the two, if his sources are credible. He cited "an al-Qaeda source" as saying that in the early and mid-1990s, the terrorist group forged a nonaggression pact with the Iraqi regime. Since then, Powell said, the two sides have met at least eight times "at very senior levels." He said that according to a "foreign security service," bin Laden himself met with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service. Powell further claimed that an Iraqi defector told U.S. officials that Saddam sent agents to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s to train al-Qaeda terrorists in document forgery. Powell quoted a detained al-Qaeda operative as saying that Iraq in 2000 offered to give two al-Qaeda associates chemical- or biological-weapons training, though he did not say whether the offer was taken up.

Are ties current? Powell claimed that Baghdad "harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by an al-Qaeda operative named Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. A Jordanian, al-Zarqawi, 36, last year had a leg amputated in Baghdad after he was wounded in the war in Afghanistan. During al-Zarqawi's two-month stay in Baghdad, Powell alleged, two dozen "al-Qaeda affiliates" established a cell in the city. According to Powell, al-Zarqawi, whose whereabouts are unknown, provided weapons and money to the murderers of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan last October. Powell showed the U.N. a satellite photo of a camp he claimed al-Zarqawi had set up in northeastern Iraq to produce poisons.

Though the Secretary did not establish a link between al-Zarqawi's cell and the government of Iraq, it's hard to imagine such a unit operating under Saddam's iron-fisted regime without official acquiescence. Al-Zarqawi's alleged poisons camp, however, is located in northern Iraq, which is under Kurdish rule, not Saddam's control. After Powell's speech, officials of Ansar al-Islam, a militant Kurdish group that includes veterans of al-Qaeda camps, escorted journalists to a ramshackle dirt encampment in the village of Serget whose layout appeared to match Powell's satellite photo. Reporters were allowed to wander freely and found only living quarters and a radio station. But Fareed Asasard, head of the Kurdistan Strategic Studies Center and a top official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the areas around Ansar's enclave, says the lab at the camp is "very far from modern" but that ricin is made there.

Did Powell push the case too far? A congressional aide who has received classified intelligence briefings told TIME there are still "mixed views" inside the CIA about a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. But Powell seemed to be trying to underscore risks more than prove certainties. "The nexus of poisons and terror is new," Powell said. "The nexus of Iraq and terror is old." The U.S. is edging closer to concluding that war is the only way to rip them apart. --By Romesh Ratnesar. Reported by Joshua Kucera/Serget and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Joshua Kucera/Serget and Douglas Waller/ Washington