Tehran’s accountability for al-Qaeda figures operating on its soil is shifting from the margins of intelligence assessment to the center of Western policy debate, according to Sara Harmouch, a security analyst who argues that two decades of official denials rest on a misreading of how the relationship actually works.
Harmouch, chief executive of H9 Defense and an adjunct professor at George Washington University, said the relationship is no longer a historical footnote. Her argument, laid out in interviews and commentary, challenges the institutional assumptions that have shaped US policy toward Iran and its alleged proxies, and it raises questions about whether oversight bodies in Washington have kept pace with the evidence.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610038850.
Intelligence circulating in the Middle East and among the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which US and Western officials have not confirmed, suggests that Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s de facto leader, who has long been based in Iran, is preparing attacks if the war widens, Harmouch said. That would suit both sides, she said: Iran could deny involvement, and al-Qaeda could return to the world stage against Western interests.
“Who is better to rise as a secret proxy for Iran than al-Qaeda?” she said. “Al-Qaeda keeps a low profile and continues to maintain plausible deniability.”
“It’s all possible, and it’s not far-fetched,” she said. Iran, she added, had helped with the operations, funding and logistics of the September 11 attacks. “So why wouldn’t they now, especially if they’re in such a difficult situation with the war?”
The official record is more measured. The 9/11 Commission found that Iran allowed several of the hijackers to transit its territory but found no evidence that Tehran knew of the plot. A US federal court later found Iran liable in a civil case brought by victims’ families, a judgment Iran did not contest.
Harmouch argued that Washington still treats the rivalry between Sunni and Shia Islam as a wall. In 2024 she wrote that al-Qaeda was becoming “Iran’s ace in the hole,” with Adel at the center. Western outlets turned the piece down, she said, because editors would not accept cooperation across the sectarian line. “Someone who has not been to the region at all felt compelled to tell me, oh, but there’s a Sunni-Shia divide,” she said. She made the argument instead on the podcast of Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA. Two years later, she said, the same pattern is being reported as news: al-Qaeda in Yemen has stopped fighting the Houthis, and the cooperation has spread to al-Shabaab in Somalia. “Pragmatism always trumps ideology,” she said.
As evidence of that shift, Harmouch pointed to a drone unit the Houthis helped al-Qaeda set up, a joint meeting of al-Qaeda in Yemen, al-Shabaab and the Houthis, and a claim that the Houthis paid al-Qaeda $65,000 in recent months for an attack carried out on their behalf. Al-Qaeda has publicly rejected UN findings that it cooperates with the Houthis and has stepped up anti-Houthi propaganda, which she read as cover rather than a break.
Adel, she said, is why the silence in Yemen was predictable. Al-Qaeda has never publicly named him leader because he is in Iran, and unlike Osama bin Laden he avoids the camera. A 52-minute al-Qaeda video released around this year’s September 11 anniversary used old footage of Hamza bin Laden and quoted Adel’s book without showing him. In that book, she said, the word “deception” appears 99 times.
In her account, the relationship took shape after 2001, when al-Qaeda figures fled Afghanistan for Iran. Tehran detained some and sent others home. It kept Adel, under what former CIA director George Tenet later called a loose house arrest. Adel stayed close to Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force commander, and, Harmouch said, told him: “We are partners. We’re not enemies. We are partners in changing the world.”
She traced episodes that, she said, show the house arrest was never a cage: the 2003 Riyadh bombings, which US officials said were directed in part from Iran; a 2013 plot to derail a train between Toronto and New York, which Canadian police said had direction from al-Qaeda elements in Iran; and, after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi began killing Shia in Iraq, a turn from hospitality to coercion, including the holding of members of bin Laden’s family.
In a 2007 letter, bin Laden called Iran “our main artery for funds, personnel, and communications” and warned against attacking it. In 2008, she said, Ayman al-Zawahiri praised the Revolutionary Guards for strengthening al-Qaeda in Yemen. In Syria, she said, the relationship worked like a proxy arrangement: Iran released Muhsin al-Fadhli, who moved money and fighters into the Syrian war, and in 2015 it freed Abu Khayr al-Masri and other senior figures in a prisoner exchange that, in her account, the Quds Force used to split the forces of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, now Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Abu Muhammad al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, remained in Iran until Israeli agents killed him in Tehran in 2020. The US Treasury has since sanctioned Iranian-based networks for supporting al-Qaeda. After Zawahiri was killed in 2022, Adel’s rise closed the circle, she said. Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, he has told affiliates to stop hitting Iran’s proxies, and his statements and Tehran’s have lined up on the Red Sea, on protests at American universities, and on Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the policy question runs beyond the current war. A deal, or a harder US campaign, would not end the problem, Harmouch said. Iran fights by attrition and will absorb losses the United States will not, and when it cannot control what happens outside its borders, it turns on its own population. The cells inside the United States that are often cited as a threat have not produced a directed attack, she said; they may not exist, or Tehran may be holding them as leverage that disappears once used. The likelier diversion, in her view, is an al-Qaeda attack Iran can disown, buying time to rebuild. A nuclear announcement is possible, she said, but less necessary since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz showed what it could do to American gasoline prices.
“I don’t think there is winning a war against Iran,” she said. “As long as it’s still in the fight, it is winning.”