[images and captions added by this website] June 23, 2005 Blowback in Iraq? CIA report says Iraq is becoming an urban warfare training ground for terrorists By Tom Regan IRAQ may prove to be a better training ground for terrorists that even Afghanistan was in the early days of Al Qaeda's presence there, and the result is the "training a new kind of Islamic militant" according to the BBC. The New York Times reported Wednesday that this assessment, taken from a new classified CIA report of the situation in Iraq, says that the country is serving "as a real-world laboratory for urban combat." The report, which has been circulating this month among top US government and intelligence officials, "made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict," according to the Times. The officials said the report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda. The assessment said the central role played by Iraq meant that, for now, most potential terrorists were likely to focus their energies on attacking American forces there, rather than carrying out attacks elsewhere, the officials said. But the officials said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries would soon have to contend with militants who leave Iraq equipped with considerable experience and training. Reuters reports that the Iraq insurgency is now becoming an international threat, and that it could ultimately lead to a threat to the US. "You have people coming to the action with anti-US 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 US counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. President Bush and other government officials have long said that it was better to have terrorists fighting in Iraq than in America -- Bush press secretary Scott McClellan repeated this line of thinking during the daily White House press conference Wednesday. Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online reporter Edmund Roy reports that the development of Iraq as a training ground for terrorists was something that the US and its allies had hoped to avoid. Two decades ago Afghanistan became the magnet for Islamic militants, who later on became the Al Qaeda network operating under the protection of the Taliban. While the Afghan operation was largely fought on a rural battlefield, the CIA report says that Iraq is now providing extremists with more comprehensive skills, including training in operations devised for populated urban areas. Thus bombings, assassinations and conventional military attacks on police and military targets have increased with deadly effect, but the White House isn't quite ready to admit to anything just yet. Mr. Roy also reports that American military officers in Iraq have told him that "the gearing up of a competent new Iraqi military is at least five to 10 years off. And that really is a figure that is just put forward because no one quite knows." While The Guardian reports that Britain's Foreign Office and Security Service doubt there will be much "spillover" to other countries, the one country that might face a problem is Saudi Arabia. If there was to be a spill-over, Saudi Arabia is potentially vulnerable because many of the Arab fighters in Iraq originate from there. Jamal Khashoggi, media adviser to the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday he agreed in part with the US assessment. "It will be worse than Afghanistan," he said. "We are talking about a very brutal type, a very weird version of Islam in Iraq. It is very scary." Newsweek reports that the insurgents' "most powerful weapon" is their vast network of spies and infiltrators. One of the biggest areas of concern is that the new Iraq army may have hundreds of "ghost soldiers" -- enlistees who show up irregularly, just enough to keep up connections but are actually working for the insurgents. The US had originally set up a system to screen them out, but it ran into problems. ... with pressure on to find an exit strategy for Iraq -- and to build significant Iraqi forces fast -- a lot of doubtful characters seem to have slipped through the cracks. Gaps in the process were quickly exploited in a strategic campaign of infiltration by the insurgency. And the Associated Press reports that, in an effort to "deflect criticism" that it was only using foreign fighters on suicide missions, the Al Qaeda spokesman in Iraq posted a note on a website that said the group had "formed a unit of potential suicide attackers who are exclusively Iraqis." Columnist Pepe Escobar argues in The Asia Times that no one should be surprised this is happening, considering some people have been warning about it happening for quite some time. Anyone familiar with the invasion and occupation of Iraq knew this for a fact as far back as two years ago -- at a time when Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld was, on the record, very happy with the idea of Iraq as the new jihad Mecca. The CIA report cannot but conclude that the new jihadis -- who are now taking their higher education in urban warfare in the Sunni triangle -- will be even deadlier than the famous Arab-Afghans. There was blowback in Afghanistan -- after the US financed a jihad. There is now blowback in Iraq -- after the US invented a jihad out of the blue. News of the CIA report comes the day after The Christian Science Monitor reported that the US had scored a success, when an international conference "broadly endorsed the perspective of a stable and free Iraq being crucial for the whole world."   War criminals? Baltimore Sun journalists call for impeachment of President Bush for lying to Congress on Iraq What really Happened: "The Lie of the Century" [illustrated] Not a war crime? See these links to five leaked secret British government papers -- Bush and Blair conniving in inventing a pretext to attack Iraq and kill 100,000 Iraqis to get their way Analysis of leaked British Cabinet Papers Six leaked British secret documents in a Zipped file

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