The more one looks into it, the more Elliott Abrams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 rendition of how Iran allegedly smuggles weapons to Hamas in Gaza via Somalia and Eritrea just gets weirder and weirder. Remember: he was Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s top Middle East adviser from December, 2002, until January 20 and, as such, had access to the most sensitive information available to the U.S. intelligence community. Yet he seems to be lending himself to an extraordinarily crude Israeli disinformation campaign in which Somalia, which is some 1500 miles from Gaza, is depicted as a key trans-shipment point for the alleged supply of weapons from Iran to Hamas.<\/p>\n
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has now posted the Abrams transcript, including the relevant passage on the alleged Iranian-Gaza smuggling routes. Among other things, he says that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the bulk\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Iranian-origin weapons for Hamas travel the Gulf of Aden route to Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153places like that\u00e2\u20ac\u009d before moving by land through Sudan and Egypt to the Sinai. By \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the bulk,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I assume he means most. Yet it seems that the only sources who have spoken of such a land route are unidentified Israeli officials. Last week, I spoke with three experts on Somalia and piracy there, and all three said they had never heard of such a route and considered it fanciful, to say the least.<\/p>\n
Here is the relevant passage in the interview:<\/p>\n
GWERTZMAN: How \u00e2\u20ac\u201d if I could just intersperse a question \u00e2\u20ac\u201d how did the Iranian arms get to Gaza in the first place?<\/p>\n
ABRAMS: Well, if you ask the Egyptians they will tell you that some of it comes by sea and that the Israelis need to do a better job at guarding the coastline.<\/p>\n
I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find any Israeli officials who accepted that view. They believe that these things actually do come in the tunnels. And the tunnels have, you know, one should not think of, sort of, tiny, dirty hole in the ground. These tunnels are industrial strength. Many of them have electricity and lights and there is a tunnel infrastructure in Gaza. There are tunnel courts where disputes are resolved. There are permits for tunnels. So this is really rather well regulated by Hamas.<\/p>\n
GWERTZMAN: I mean, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve heard that these weapons go to Sudan and up and just up the Nile?<\/p>\n
ABRAMS: Well, it appears that they come by sea, most of them, by sea from Iran and go around Gulf of Aiden [sic] and, right, and up ultimately they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think they go through the canal, most of them by ship and out into the Mediterranean and then into Gaza. Rather, it seems that they hit land in places like Yemen or Somalia or, I guess, Eritrea to some extent, places like that, you could look at the map. And then cross over into Sinai and are taken across Sinai and then sneaked into Gaza. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think this is, you know, accounts for 100% of the shipments but that seems to be the bulk of them.<\/p>\n
Now, you will remember that at the end of the Gaza War there were pledges by the United States and a number of European countries that we would try to help interdict the seaborne part of this. And the Egyptians were supposed to try the Sinai part, before you get into the area right on the border. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know whether there has actually been in the last month or so any significant increase in the maritime policing.<\/p>\n
GWERTZMAN: Right. Next question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Before Abrams spoke about it on the record, by far the best dissection of the story on which Abrams seems to have based his assertions about the land route appeared Feb 1 on the Moon of Alabama website<\/a> which I strongly urge you to visit. Entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIranian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Weapon Ships<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it does a masterful job \u00e2\u20ac\u201c far better and more detailed than I can do here \u00e2\u20ac\u201d of tracing the convoluted story of the Cypriot-flagged Russian container ship Monchegorsk, which was boarded and searched by the U.S. Navy January 19 near the entrance to the Red Sea after passing through the Gulf of Aden. It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who really drew attention<\/a> to the incident when, asked about it by an Israeli reporter at the Foreign Press Center here January 27, Mullen suggested that unidentified weapons carried aboard the vessel were bound for Syria but were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153going to end up in Gaza.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He provided no theory, however, on how they might get from Syria to Gaza.<\/p>\n