The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, Michael Ledeen

export the Iranian Revolution, and attack their enemies—the Jews, the infidels, and (mostly Sunni) Muslims who do not accept their doctrine—all over the world. Shortly after the revolution, Iranian-supported “pilgrims” on the Hajj in Mecca occupied the Grand Mosque, took several hundred hostages, and called for the overthrow of the ruling Saudi royal family, and the end of all ties to the West. The Grand Mosque became a battleground, and it took two weeks of tough fighting—and some 250 dead, including scores of Saudi national guardsmen, and hundreds wounded—to reestablish order.
    The assault on the Grand Mosque had a significant footnote: the first appearance of the name bin Laden in conjunction with a terrorist attack. Osama bin Laden’s brother Mahrous was apparently involved in the operation, and was miraculously spared the executioner’s scimitar. He even gained early release from prison, abandoned political activism, and subsequently devoted all his energies to the family business.
    Ever since, Iran has sponsored terrorism all over the world, and has ceaselessly attacked the United States in word and deed. For many years, the State Department has declared the Islamic Republic the leading supporter of international, state-sponsored terrorism, and for good reason. The Iranians created the Islamic Jihad organization, and Hezbollah, the big terrorist army based in Lebanon and now Syria. Moreover, Iran has long supported al Qaeda, which baffles a lot of people because it is a Sunni organization. The explanation is quite simple: like Mafia families who fight and sometimes kill one another, when faced with a common enemy, the family heads sit down around the table and make a common war plan. The ties between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda have been a well-established fact ever since the autumn of 1998, when the American government indicted the organization and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The key section of the indictment states the case explicitly: “Al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group, Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”
    By the time this indictment was issued, we knew that al Qaeda had attacked us directly, in 1993, in the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in New York City. Federal investigators had established working connections between al Qaeda and the commander of the operation, the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. We also knew of close operational cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian jihadi organization that had been at the center of the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat.
    As a matter of fact, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which were originally created by Khomeini as his own personal praetorian guard, and subsequently used for crucial tasks of domestic repression and foreign terrorism, were trained and organized in the early 1970s by Yasser Arafat’s (Sunni) Fatah.
    The most dramatic example of Sunni-Shi’ite cooperation is Iran’s close relationship with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa—for which al Qaeda took credit—were in large part Iranian operations. Bin Laden had asked Hezbollah’s operational chief, Imad Mughniyah (one of the most dangerous terrorists to ever walk the earth), for help making al Qaeda as potent as Hezbollah, and the original concept for the simultaneous bombings in Kenya and Tanzania came directly from Mughniyah.
    The al Qaeda terrorists were trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the explosives were provided by Iran. After the attacks, one of the leaders of the operations, Saif al-Adel, took refuge in Iran, where he remains active in operations as of this writing.
    Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, which evolved into today’s Islamic State, created his first