Iran's continuing ties to al Qaeda

VOA:

As the U.S. and the West continue negotiations with Iran over its controversial nuclear program, the specter of Iran’s ties to terrorism - and specifically al-Qaida - lingers in the background, analysts and U.S. officials say.
 
“This is something that has gone back several decades now, but continues to get short shrift from the U.S. government,” said Jonathan Schanzer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Iran’s playing three dimensional chess,” he said. “We see al-Qaida becomes useful to Iran in terms of attacking the United States, attacking the West, vilifying and targeting Israel. All these things very much work in Iran’s favor.”

For the past several years, the only U.S. government agency to consistently make the case linking Iran to al-Qaida has been the Treasury Department, which in February designated an Iran-based terrorist, Jafar al-Uzbeki, as a key al-Qaida facilitator. The designation accused him of funneling a “significant amount” of money from Iran into Afghanistan and Pakistan to help fund al-Qaida activities.

The designation also linked al-Uzbeki to Yasin al-Suri, previously identified as the head of al-Qaida’s Iran network and one of a handful of operatives identified since 2011 for getting al-Qaida fighters into Syria. And according to a senior Treasury official, al-Uzbeki has been “operating with the knowledge of the Iranian authorities.”
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“Ultimately the enmity between Iran and al-Qaida is almost deeper than the enmity between the United States and al-Qaida,” said Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. “But Iran is stuck in the region, and as a result sometimes it does strike small deals in order to actually protect itself or to advance its interests in other ways.”
Parsi said that in 2003, Iran was willing to trade al-Qaida operatives it caught fleeing from U.S. forces in Afghanistan to the United States in exchange for several concessions, a deal Washington rejected.

Yet not everyone is convinced the relationship between Iran and al-Qaida is one of forced convenience.

Investigators looking at the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. raised concerns in their final report, pointing to “discussions in Sudan between al-Qaida and Iranian operatives” in the early 1990s.
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The 9/11 commission’s report cited possible collaboration between Iran and al-Qaida in the June 1996 attack on Khobar Towers, a residential complex housing American Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen Americans were killed and 372 wounded.

The commission also turned up evidence suggesting Iran gave passage to the 9/11 hijackers, although commission member and former CIA operative Mike Hurley said there never was anything to suggest a larger role for Tehran in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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There is much more.

These two major factions of Islamic religious bigotry see the US as a common enemy and will from time to time unite in an effort to attack the US and its interests.  It is their mutual hatred of those who don;t subscribe to their weird religious beliefs that unite them.