Was Saddam involved in the September 11 attacks?
There is no hard evidence linking Saddam to the attacks, and Iraq denies any involvement. However, it didn’t express sympathy for the United States after the attacks. Some Iraq watchers still suspect Saddam was at least indirectly involved.

Does Iraq have ties with al-Qaeda?
US Intelligence has learned that senior al-Qaeda leader, a Jordanian terrorist named Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, reportedly was treated in Baghdad for injuries he received while fighting in Afghanistan.  Intelligence has also reported that al-Zarqawi may be building terrorist connections with al-Qaeda members receiving safe haven in Iraq.

What type of terrorist groups does Iraq support?
Primarily groups who can hurt Saddam’s regional foes. Saddam has helped the Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist group fighting the Turkish government. Moreover, Iraq has hosted several Palestinian splinter groups that oppose any peace agreement with Israel, including the mercenary Abu Nidal Organization, whose leader, Abu Nidal, was found dead in Baghdad in August 2002. Iraq has also supported other Palestinian groups, including the Islamist Hamas movement, and reportedly channels money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam is a secular dictator, so his regime tends to support secular terrorist groups rather than Islamists such as al-Qaeda, experts say.

What are U.S.-Iraq relations like?
Hostile. That wasn’t always the case; in the 1980s, following the Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, the United States saw Saddam as a useful regional counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Indeed, when Iraq launched a long, brutal war against Iran in 1980, the Reagan administration provided Saddam’s regime with arms, funds, and support.

But U.S.-Iraq relations ruptured in August 1990, when Iraq invaded its tiny, oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait, prompting the United Nations to impose economic sanctions and eventually authorize war. In the winter of 1991, a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait but stopped short of ousting Saddam. After the war, the U.N. Security Council maintained economic sanctions on Iraq; established two “no-fly” zones patrolled by U.S. and British planes to protect Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south; and imposed international weapons inspections to prevent Saddam from rebuilding his arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.

The Clinton administration sought to contain Saddam with a mixture of sanctions and arms inspections but ultimately concluded that Saddam had to go. Today, Bush administration officials call Saddam’s regime an immediate threat to America—because of its history of attacking its neighbors, using chemical weapons, supporting terrorist groups, defying U.N. Security Council resolutions, and seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. In his first State of the Union address after September 11, President Bush said Iraq belonged to an “axis of evil.”

Has Iraq ever used weapons of mass destruction?
Yes. In the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi troops repeatedly used poison gas, including mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin, against Iranian soldiers. Iranian officials also accuse Iraq of dropping mustard-gas bombs on Iranian villages. Human Rights Watch reports that Iraq frequently used nerve agents and mustard gas against Iraqi Kurds living in the country’s north. In March 1988, Saddam’s forces killed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja with chemical weapons.