Photo by Charles Smart on Unsplash
The Jewish state is not only being attacked by its neighbours, but also by many other countries. The German media (DIE WELT) has received information from the secret services proving that there is a trail all the way to the Sahara. A militia is forming there against Israel and its leaders are discussing terrible plans on the telephone, writes Christine Kensche.
Since the start of the Gaza war, Israel’s enemies have been vying with each other with threats and fantasies of extermination – and some are actively intervening to support Hamas. The Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel on an almost daily basis, and terrorists have attempted to infiltrate the country via the northern border. Israeli communities close to the border with Lebanon have had to be evacuated.
Syrian militants have reportedly come forward to support the fight against Israel. The Huthi in Yemen have officially declared war on Israel and have targeted southern Israel with long-range missiles and drones, although these were shot down earlier by a US military vessel. In Iraq, Shiite militias attacked American military bases. The Algerian parliament voted en bloc for war against Israel. And even in the depths of Africa, militias welcome attacks on the Jewish state and offer their support to its enemies.
Iran is behind all these activities. The Shiite regime has woven a global network of militias that it supports with arms, money and training, and which it uses in return in its strategy of terror – against the West in general and the United States and Israel in particular.
As the reports of Western secret services and financial investigators, which DIE WELT has been able to consult exclusively, show, Tehran has been expanding its network for several years. As a result, Iran no longer only supports Shiite and Sunni organisations, but also those that have nothing in common with Israel and fundamentalist Islam.
The trail leads to the Sahara
The Polisario Front, a socialist militia based in the Tindouf refugee camps in southern Algeria, is a good example of how Tehran proceeds. The Algerian-backed independence movement sees itself as the true representative of the indigenous people of the Western Sahara, the desert strip that stretches along the Atlantic coast. After a UN-sponsored ceasefire in 1991, the Polisario Front gave in when Morocco gained the upper hand. But in 2020, it resumed the fight against Morocco.
The group controls a small part of Western Sahara and maintains a camp in the Algerian province of Tindouf, on the border with Morocco, where around 150,000 Sahrawis live.
Because of its support for the Polisario Front, Morocco broke off relations with Iran in 2018. Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful militia, “sent military representatives to the Polisario, supplied weapons to the front and trained them in urban warfare”, said Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita at the time. Polisario members in Western Sahara have been supplied with surface-to-air missiles and drones by Tehran. Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, has set up camps in Algeria where it trains Polisario fighters.
While the leaders of the Polisario Front and Hezbollah denied these accusations, Morocco said it had a large file containing detailed reports and satellite images of meetings between Hezbollah and Polisario representatives in Algeria. Morocco claimed that Iran had also helped to organise meetings between the Polisario Front and Hezbollah through its embassy in Algeria. Last year, a Polisario Front representative claimed that Iran, through Algeria, was supplying them with “kamikaze” drones to use against Morocco.
New secret service reports, which DIE WELT has been able to consult, support Morocco’s accusations. The newspaper has recordings and transcripts of telephone conversations between Polisario representatives and an agent posing as a Hezbollah contact in Côte d’Ivoire. Mustafa Muhammad Lemine Al-Kitab is therefore the Polisario liaison officer in Syria and responsible for the Middle East.
The agent asked about the situation
In a conversation recorded on 23 October, around two weeks after the attack on Israel in which Hamas massacred 1,400 people, the agent asked Lemine Al-Kitab about the situation. The Polisario man replied: “Praise be to Allah. The young people are encouraged by the victory of the resistance and the actions against the Jews and the victory over them everywhere”. And further on: “I see that the resistance is catching fire everywhere. It has broken out in Gaza, it may break out in the Golan Heights (…) and in the south (of Lebanon, editor’s note) and in the Shebaa farms, and it will also break out in the Western Sahara and there will be a unified resistance. Everyone will fire from a different place (at Israel, editor’s note)”.
During the conversation, the alleged Hezbollah representative and the Polisario emissary discussed the possibility of joint attacks against Israel with Hamas, Hezbollah, Algeria and Iran. Lemine Al-Kitab offered to support the Polisario Front, but stressed that its resources were not yet sufficient to attack the Israeli embassy in Morocco, for example. In other interviews, he asks for even more support from Hezbollah and Iran.
Earlier this year, WELT revealed the existence of a hawala network operating from Spain and the Tindouf camps in Algeria, with close contacts with the Polisario, Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah. The hawala is an ancient method of transferring money without going through legal banks. For example, a person pays X amount of money to a “hawaladar” in Beirut. The latter informs his liaison officer in Algeria, who pays the sum to the beneficiary there, without the money having moved. The hawaladars’ stocks of cash in Europe, Africa and the Middle East balance each other out or, if necessary, by smuggling cash, jewellery or luxury watches.
Iran conceals its financial aid to Hezbollah, Hamas and probably also the Polisario Front with the help of hawala networks whose financial flows are difficult to control.
Even more useful since the Abraham Agreement
Iran, with the help of its proxies, has always attacked those Arab states which, from the fundamentalists’ point of view, are “too Western” and closer to Israel. The socialist militia fighting Morocco has become even more useful to Tehran since Morocco signed the Abraham Peace Accords with Israel. In return, the United States recognised Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara. The North African state has thus become the focus of Iranian attempts to destabilise the region.
And the Polisario is apparently arming itself in its fight against Morocco: a fortnight ago, rockets were fired at residential areas in the town of Smara, in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. One man was killed and three others injured, according to the Moroccan authorities. The Polisario Front is suspected.
Hamas also started “small”, with short-range missiles over southern Israel, and its projectiles now reach the heart of Israel. And its terrorist commandos have managed to outwit the Israeli secret services. Mustafa Muhammad Lemine Al-Kitab, the Polisario’s Middle East envoy, has in any case already integrated the Hamas discourse: “This war is a war of jihad and resistance against the occupation and against the Zionist project”, he says in the recording of the telephone conversation on 23 October, and “resistance has a price in terms of losses. We know that this freedom will have a high price, we will make sacrifices and martyrs, but in the end, we will win”.
Source: eubriefs.com
This article first appeared in French in EUBriefs, and is reproduced here in English with the permission of the Editor of EUBriefs.
