interrogator, about this topic. Degn said that Saddam’s government used the hawala system, which is an unofficial banking system involving a network of brokers to transfer funds with no documentation, to fund elements of al-Qaeda that were willing to work across ideological lines. Degn said that al-Qaeda had at least two training camps in Iraq, specifically in Anbar Province and the western part of the country, and that at least two cells operated, one loyal to Zarqawi and another to Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Degn also said there is evidence that Iraq sponsored attacks on American forces in Kuwait.

This is supported by the testimony of a captured terrorist who said in 2005 that al-Qaeda had a camp in Fallujah before the war began. A Time magazine article from 2003reports that an Ansar al-Islam document describes one terrorist has having met with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad shortly before the war in Iraq started. In July 2008, I interviewed Don Bordenkircher, the former national director of prison and jail operations in Iraq. He said that detainees he spoke with confirmed that forces under the command of Uday Hussein gave al-Qaeda members shelter and training and that the terrorist group was able to operate in parts of Iraq under government control, specifically in Mosul and Kirkuk. Additional testimony exists to show that al-Qaeda was in Iraq prior to the war.

Iraq is also known to have harbored Abu Ibrahim, a high-level terrorist who worked with Iraqi intelligence in launching attacks in London, Rome, Athens, and Berlin. He is now