Iraq and al-Qaeda
However, the report, grabbed off the Internet from an Israeli publication, turned out to be a grad student’s work based on 12-year-old data. And the camps, as reporters later discovered, were squalid little compounds outside Hussein’s direct authority lacking electricity and running water. In addition, the militants occupying them, like bin Laden himself, despise Hussein.
Bin Laden’s goal, after all, is to restore an Islamic caliphate with Baghdad as its capital and replace Hussein’s secular regime. Most unaligned analysts believe that the ideological rift between bin Laden and Hussein is far too great to enable them to partner up.