This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Skepticism In 2003, American terrorism analyst Evan Kohlman said in an interview:

In 2006, a report of postwar findings by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that:

The same report also concluded that:

The result of the publication of the Senate report was the belief that the entire connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was an official deception based on cherry picking specific intelligence data that bolstered the case for war with Iraq regardless of its reliability. One instance of this reaction was reported in a BBC news article, which stated:

Gulf War

1988 According to the sworn testimony of al-Qaeda member Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali in 2001, Osama bin Laden delivered a lecture in Pakistan in 1988, during which he spoke against Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party and warned his listeners about Saddam's expansionist ambitions in the Middle East.

1990 Circa February, Mecca Khalid Batarfi, an old friend of Osama bin Laden, claimed in a 2005 interview with Peter Bergen that bin Laden had already predicted Saddam's invasion of Kuwait by 1990 and had begun preparations for war against Saddam. According to Batarfi, bin Laden said, "We should train our people, our young and increase our army and prepare for the day when eventually we are attacked. This guy [Saddam] can never be trusted." Batarfi himself went on to say that bin Laden "doesn't believe [Saddam] is a Muslim. So he never liked him nor trusted him."

2 August, Kuwait

The Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait, beginning the Gulf War. In response to the perceived threat to Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden offered to bring an army of jihadist fighters to protect the kingdom against Saddam, but the Saudi royal family opted instead to seek help from America. The presence of American troops on the Arabian peninsula after the end of the Gulf War became, for bin Laden, a key piece of evidence that the US was at war with Islam. Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the former head of the Saudi intelligence agency Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, noted of bin Laden: "I saw radical changes in his personality as he changed from a calm, peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance."

While bin Laden continued to oppose Saddam's Baathist government, he was also vocal in criticizing the UN sanctions against Iraq. Bin Laden's bodyguard recalled that his intentions included not only the liberation of Kuwait but also "rescuing the Iraqi people from the domination of the Ba'th Party."

1992 According to information that was first made public in the Feith memo, Hassan al-Turabi arranged a meeting between members of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and members of al-Qaeda, allegedly to create a common strategy for deposing pro-Western Arab governments. According to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower:

1993 13 March

Having been questioned and released by the FBI for purported involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin boarded a flight to Amman and continued on to Baghdad, where he allegedly moved in with a relative and received support from the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government claimed it imprisoned Yasin in 1994 until at least 2002. Iraq reportedly made an offer to the Clinton administration to trade Yasin in 1998, which the administration rejected. The Iraqis purportedly made a similar offer to the Bush administration in 2003, also rejected.

An anonymous intelligence official claimed that Iraq required the US to sign a statement discussing Yasin's whereabouts that was at odds with the US's "version of the facts." Former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, however, claimed that the offers were made without conditions. The same intelligence official stated that the Iraqis wanted the US to "sign a lengthy document that included information about Yasin's whereabouts since 1993, and how they had tried to turn him over. "We refused to sign," said the official, "Because we believe their version was inaccurate." The US, he said, offered to sign a simple receipt acknowledging that the Iraqis had turned Yasin over to us. But they did not respond."

Neil Herman, who headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center attack, noted that despite Yasin's presence in Baghdad, there was no evidence of Iraqi support for the attack. "We looked at that rather extensively," he told CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen. "There were no ties to the Iraqi government." Bergen wrote:

During the 9/11 Commission hearings, former US counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke was asked about whether Yasin going to Iraq established a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. His response was unequivocating:

1994 Farouk Hijazi, former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, allegedly met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter-terrorism official Vincent Cannistraro claimed that bin Laden rejected Hijazi's overtures, and concluded that bin Laden did not want to be "exploited" by Iraq's secular administration. According to The Guardian:

1995

19 February, Sudan A handwritten note, part of the Operation Iraqi Freedom documents collection released by the US government in 2006, suggested that a representative of Saddam's government met with bin Laden in Sudan on 19 February 1995. According to the note, bin Laden suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia.

An ABC News article noted that al-Qaeda staged an attack in Riyadh nine months after the date of the document, though it did not go so far as to ascribe any responsibility to Iraq. ABC reported that the militants who attacked the facility "later confessed on Saudi TV to having been trained by Osama bin Laden." The ABC article further noted that "the document does not establish that the two parties did in fact enter into an operational relationship," and also that the contacts may have "been approved personally by Saddam Hussein." The article also cautioned that "this document is handwritten and has no official seal."

CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen commented: "The results of this meeting were ... nothing. Two subsequent attacks against American forces in Saudi Arabia—a car bombing that year and the Khobar Towers attack in 1996—were carried out, respectively, by locals who said they were influenced by Mr. Bin Laden and by the Saudi branch of Hezbollah, a Shiite group aided by Iranian government officials." Registration required.

The New York Times reported that a "joint intelligence task force" concluded that the document "appeared authentic". The document, which asserted that bin Laden "was approached by our side," stateed that bin Laden previously "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative," but was willing to meet in Sudan. At the meeting, bin Laden requested that sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric be rebroadcast in Iraq, a request which, according to the document, was approved by Baghdad. The document also stated that Iraqi intelligence officers began "seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of [bin Laden's departure from Sudan]". The document went on to recommend that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."

September, Sudan Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed, a top explosives expert of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), allegedly met with bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in September–October 1995. According to the 9/11 Commission Report:

A second meeting between the IIS and bin Laden was alleged to have taken place in Sudan, in July 1996. At this meeting, Mani' Abd Rashid al-Tikriti, a director of the IIS, was allegedly present. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, however, the veracity of the second meeting is in doubt:

From 1995, Salman Pak, Iraq Several Iraqi defectors reported that hundreds of foreign terrorists were being trained in airplane hijacking techniques "without weapons" using a real airplane—variously reported as a Boeing 707 and a Tupolev Tu-154—as a prop at Salman Pak, an Iraqi military facility just south of Baghdad, between 1995 and 2000. The training program was allegedly run by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. This allegation was also reported by the following defectors: Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami (former Iraqi army captain), who provided details of the layout of the camp as early as 1998. "Abu Zeinab" al-Ghurairy (former Iraqi sergeant who claimed to be a general), who corroborated Khodada's details in 2000. Khidir Hamza, a scientist who worked on Iraq's nuclear program. Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, an Iraqi Intelligence Service agent in US custody. "Abu Mohammed", a former colonel in Fedayeen Saddam.

The credibility of Khodada and Abu Zeinab is often questioned, however, due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for administration change. According to Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News:

One of the defectors, al-Ghurairy, has been described as "a complete fake—a low-ranking former soldier whom Ahmed Chalabi's aides had coached to deceive the media." Another defector who interviewed al-Ghurairy noted, "He is an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories."

Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led US officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior US official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak other than the testimony of several INC defectors.

Saddam's government had even denied that an airplane existed 25 kilometers southeast of Baghdad. The Iraqi ambassador to the U.N., Mohammed Aldouri, told Frontline in the fall of 2001:

The chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, expressed a different opinion about Salman Pak in 2001: "We always just called them the terrorist camps. We reported them at the time, but they've obviously taken on new significance." He also said that the Iraqis told the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) that the Salman Pak facility was used by police for counter-terrorist training. "Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained. Furthermore, after the invasion of Iraq, the camp was captured by US Marines "after it was discussed by Egyptian and Sudanese fighters caught elsewhere in Iraq." Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks described the capture, saying:

The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, however, expressed an opposing stance:

A similar view was also held by Douglas MacCollam, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review:

In the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2006 report, the Defense Intelligence Agency stated that it found "no credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak after 1991." Explaining the origin of the false allegations, the DIA concluded that Operation Desert Storm had brought attention to the training base at Salman Pak, and thus "fabricators and unestablished sources who reported hearsay or third-hand information created a large volume of human intelligence reporting. This type of reporting surged after September 2001."

Circa 1995, Iraq