Syrian Kurdish Forces Announce Arrest of Individual Linked to 9/11 Attacks

A senior commander of the Syrian Kurdish forces announced on Wednesday, April 17, the arrest of a Syrian-German man accused of collaborating with the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the Associated Press, the Kurdish commander stated that Mohammad Haydar Zammar was detained by Kurdish security forces in northern Syria and is currently being interrogated. The report indicates that Zammar, who is now believed to be over fifty years old, was responsible for recruiting some of the September 11 attackers for al-Qaeda. The Associated Press reports that Zammar was arrested in December 2001 in a joint operation with the CIA in Morocco and was handed over to the Syrian government two weeks later. The Syrian government sentenced Mohammad Haydar Zammar to 12 years in prison in 2007 for membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. However, four years later, with the onset of protests in Syria, Bashar al-Assad's government released several Islamist prisoners, and some managed to escape from prison and join Islamist fighting groups. Nevertheless, the Kurdish commander did not specify which Islamist groups Zammar was collaborating with at the time of his arrest. The al-Nusra Front is an Islamist group in Syria that is linked to al-Qaeda. The Islamic State (ISIS) is also another active Islamist group in Syria. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militants, have managed to reclaim large areas of territory from ISIS in the past year with U.S. support. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda-affiliated forces hijacked four passenger planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon in the Washington D.C. suburbs. The fourth plane also crashed in Pennsylvania. Approximately three thousand people were killed and six thousand injured as a result of these attacks. Osama bin Laden, who is referred to as the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, was killed by U.S. forces ten years after the attack at his residence in Pakistan.