CIA Confirms Iraq a Terrorist Training Ground

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CIA says Iraq is now a terrorist training ground
Wed Jun 22, 2005 3:35 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA believes the Iraq insurgency poses an international threat and may produce better-trained Islamic terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, officials said on Wednesday.
A classified report from the U.S. spy agency says Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of skills, from car bombings and assassinations to coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets, officials said.

Once the insurgency ends, Islamic militants are likely to disperse as highly organized battle-hardened combatants capable of operating throughout the Arab-speaking world and in other regions including Europe.

Fighters leaving Iraq would primarily pose a challenge for their countries of origin including Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

But the May report, which has been widely circulated in the intelligence community, also cites a potential threat to the United States.

"You have people coming to the action with anti-U.S. sentiment ... And since they're Iraqi or foreign Arabs or to some degree Kurds, they have more communities they can blend into outside Iraq," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the report's classified status.

Canada also released an intelligence report saying the Sunni insurgency in Iraq posed a global problem given that most of the world's Sunni Muslims live outside the Middle East.

"The current war in Iraq is creating a whole new set of extremists," the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said in a briefing document obtained by Reuters.

Meanwhile, a Pentagon official said the CIA report appeared to be a synthesis of intelligence information already known to military commanders in the Gulf region.

Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s, U.S. officials say.

Bin Laden won prominence as a U.S. ally in the war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He later used Afghanistan as the training center for his al Qaeda network, which is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.

President Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in part by charging that Saddam Hussein was supporting al Qaeda. A U.S. inquiry later found no collaboration between prewar Iraq and the bin Laden network.


http://today.reuters.com/news/newsA...IDST_0_INTERNATIONAL-SECURITY-IRAQ-CIA-DC.XML



US Inquiry later found no collaboration between prewar Iraq and Bin Laden...Is that so? Hence all these terrorist training grounds appeared right after the fall of the Ba'ath Party?
 
no camps in pre war iraq....but you bet that every islamic militant worth his salt flooded across iraqs borders as soon as the US did
 
chewie_nz said:
no camps in pre war iraq....but you bet that every islamic militant worth his salt flooded across iraqs borders as soon as the US did

Not entirely true they did have the anti-Iranian group on the Iranian border that were listed as terrorists however I am not sure the Americans saw them that way.
 
I always knew that it was a terrorist breeding ground. The are coming from everywhere around the middle east, creating havoc.
 
Baath ideological objectives were secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab unionism. Baath Party was from the beginning a secular Arab nationalist party. I think after Desert Storm Sadam began his aproach to terrorism, as a way to fight the US. How ever I do not think that he was relationated with the Al-Qaeda network, I would say that he "made" his own fanatics, he was to egocentric to ask somebody for help.
 
if its unstable, prehaps we should send in the military to topple the government and restore order to the place :rambo: ;)

what i want to know is how they came to that conclusion? did they to a door to door survey? a "rate your neighbourhood on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being, i have armed my kids with rpgs for safety and 10 being more peaceful than an eskimo." or did they to an Australian Idol type phone poll: quick, phone now, Iraq decides whether it is better or worse than before" or prehaps the phone system needs to be fully reconnected first ;)
 
Locke said:
if its unstable, prehaps we should send in the military to topple the government and restore order to the place :rambo: ;)

what i want to know is how they came to that conclusion? did they to a door to door survey? a "rate your neighbourhood on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being, i have armed my kids with rpgs for safety and 10 being more peaceful than an eskimo." or did they to an Australian Idol type phone poll: quick, phone now, Iraq decides whether it is better or worse than before" or prehaps the phone system needs to be fully reconnected first ;)

Funny.
 
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