Salman Pak Facility - Alleged Connections To Terrorism

Alleged Connections To Terrorism

The facility was discussed in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress to assert that the facility was a terrorist training camp. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has since established that both the CIA and the DIA concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. A DIA analyst told the Committee, "The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel noted in November 2005 that "After the war, U.S. officials determined that a facility in Salman Pak was used to train Iraqi anti-terrorist commandos.". And PBS Frontline - who originally carried many of the allegations of Iraqi defectors - similarly noted that "U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques."

Iraqi defectors associated with the INC asserted that the facility was used by the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence) to train Iraqi militia groups such as the Fedayeen in use of military small arms, RPG's, assassination, espionage, and counter insurgency techniques. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, members of the Iraqi National Congress promoted claims that the facility was used to train the hijackers. Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraqi Army, claimed that the attacks had been carried out by people who had been trained in Iraq. In a PBS special on US television, a man identified only "an Iraqi Lieutenant General", claimed that in 2000 he had been "the security officer in charge of the unit" at Salman Pak and had seen Arab students being taught how to hijack airliners using a Boeing 707 fuselage at Salman Pak. The independent Iraqi weekly Al-Yawm Al-Aakher interviewed a former Iraqi officer who also claimed that Salman Pak was being used to train foreign terrorists. A mass grave containing 150 bodies was also found in June 2003. The bodies were apparently executed prisoners who were killed three days before US troops entered Baghdad in April 2003. Seymour Hersh notes that "Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war ." Douglas MacCollam wrote in the July/August 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that "There still remain claims and counterclaims about what was going on at Salman Pak. But the consensus view now is that the camp was what Iraq told UN weapons inspectors it was — a counterterrorism training camp for army commandos."

Other U.S. officials and journalists have concluded that Salman Pak was used to train foreign (non-Iraqi) fighters for counterterrorism. Douglas Jehl of the "New York Times" reported that Charles A. Duelfer, chief weapons inspector in Iraq, reported that as recently as three months before the March 2003 invasion, "a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service known as M14, the directorate for special operations, oversaw a highly secretive enterprise known as the Challenge Project, involving explosives ... trained Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, Yemeni, Lebanese, Egyptian and Sudanese operatives in counterterrorism, explosives, marksmanship and foreign operations at its facilities at Salman Pak, near Baghdad."

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qa'ida operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations." The CIA and DIA both told the Committee that their postwar exploration of the facility "has yielded no indications that training of al-Qa'ida linked individuals took place there. In June 2006, the DIA told the Committee that it has 'no credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak after 1991." (p. 108)

The vote in the committee was nearly unanimous (14-1). Four Republican senators on the committee—three of whom approved the document—complained in an addendum that it was written "with more partisan bias than we have witnessed in a long time in Washington."