Afghan, Iraqi insurgents collaborating in fight against US

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Afghan, Iraqi insurgents collaborating in fight against Americans

PARIS, Oct 14 (AFP) - Afghan rebels are now travelling to Iraq to learn from insurgents there and returning home equipped with deadlier weapons and new
techniques to use against US troops, analysts and reports say.

And the increasing use of suicide bombers in Afghanistan suggests that outsiders are now working alongside the homegrown insurgents, they say.

"There have been some changes in the way things are being done in Afghanistan," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA agent who was based in Pakistan during the Afghan rebellion against Soviet occupation.

"Whether it's some old Taliban or some new insurgency, some of the things we're seeing happen have the fingerprints of things that are going on in Iraq," he told AFP.

The Taliban insurgency has been focused on southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the bulk of a US-led coalition of 20,000 troops in the war-ravaged country has been hunting down Taliban and Al-Qaeda insurgents.

More than 1,400 people, most of them militants, have been killed in insurgency-linked violence this year, up from 850 last year.

The US magazine Newsweek in late September said its reporter had met two Taliban regional leaders, Mohammed Daud and Hamza Sangari, who told of spending several weeks in Iraq being trained by insurgents there.

"I'm explaining to my fighters every day the lessons I learned and my experience in Iraq," Daud told the weekly. "I want to copy in Afghanistan the tactics and spirit of the glorious Iraqi resistance".

US-led coalition forces and Iraqi security forces have been battling insurgents since the 2003 American-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Olivier Roy, a leading French expert on the region, said there was clearly an increase of foreigners among the Taliban, the Islamic movement which ran Afghanistan from 1996-2001.

"In September there was a declaration by an Al-Qaeda spokesman, who was speaking in northwestern Pakistan, saying that there had been an influx of volunteers to go and fight against the Americans in Afghanistan," he said.

"It's an internationalisation of the line of the Taliban, a part of which wants to join the global jihad," Roy added. "The aim is to create an esprit de corps, an international mindset."

"In this case Fallujah (the Iraqi city that saw a pitched battle between Iraqi fighters and US forces last November) plays the role that Afghanistan played for Abdullah Azzam (the mentor of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden) -- not so much to create an Islamic state but to raise a legion of internationalist Islamists, a generation devoted to global jihad."

Afghan officials, in particular the country's defence minister, have also recently said that the Al-Qaeda network has been sending Arab agents into Afghanistan.

Taliban insurgents had not previously used suicide bombing in their campaign, nor had the anti-Soviet fighters before them, suggesting that such recent attacks in Afghanistan may have been carried out by foreigners.

In Iraq, suicide bombings are an almost daily event, and are believed to be carried out mostly by foreign fighters.

Getting to Iraq from Afghanistan requires crossing Iran.

"There's nothing easier if you follow the smugglers' route," said Roy.

In May this year the UN drug agency said Iraq had become a transit country for heroin produced in Afghanistan -- the country produces about 87 percent of the world's opium, most of which ends up as heroin on the streets of Europe --

and then shipped out via Iran.

An Afghan interior ministry spokesman has said that the Taliban now possess SAM surface-to-air missiles they bought in Iraq's northern Kurdish region.

"If Afghans are going out of the country to receive training, that's entirely new," said Bearden, the former CIA agent.

Further signs suggesting this inlcuded, he said, the recent increase in Afghanistan of "improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that are blowing up."

"And that could be something that could tell us that we're in for big, big problems in Afghanistan. I believe that we are, and that if it wasn't for Iraq we might be worried more about Afghanistan."

The US-led campaign that removed the Taliban in late 2001 was launched after they failed to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York.
 
i think they communicate with ancient form of postal service now (people-to-people taking months),

cuz if those big name insurgents dare to use cell phone or anything, U.S will track them down and send a couple missiles, sort of like what Russians did to a Chechen leader
 
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