Posted on 08/10/2003 11:01:13 PM PDT by Destro
August 11 2003
Headline: Influx of al-Qaeda allies feared in Iraq -- Detail Story
WASHINGTON: Some US officials and terrorism specialists expressed apprehensions of influx of the militants sympathetic to and possibly allied with Osama bin Laden in Iraq in the same way as they had flooded into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet occupation there, a US daily reported on Sunday.
That Afghan war became known as the Soviet Union's Vietnam and radicalized a generation of Arab fighters, including bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
In Iraq, even before the United States invaded and occupied the country, fighters from several Arab and non-Arab countries had infiltrated in the hope of waging a guerrilla war against Western occupying forces, according to US officials.
Investigators suspect that such foreign militants -- possibly from the group Ansar al-Islam, which has been linked to Al Qaeda -- may have been behind Thursday's bombing outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, although they said they could not rule out disgruntled members of Iraq's Ba'ath Party, US officials said. The death toll from the attack was raised to 19 yesterday.
Analysts outside the government see these combatants as important factors in the Iraq equation. That's going to be a continuing source of instability,' said Vincent Cannistraro, former counter terrorism chief for the CIA. Even if we catch Saddam tomorrow, that doesn't mean the resistance is going to go away, he said.
Defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the United States is holding several hundred foreign fighters captured in Iraq, the majority of them Syrians. Others include Saudis, Sudanese, Egyptians, Yemenis, Moroccans, and Albanians, according to US government officials and terrorism specialists.
According to a foreign policy analyst who is in frequent contact with US officials in Baghdad, the belief on the ground is that radical foreign Islamists -- perhaps members of Al Qaeda, or members of other international terror groups -- are playing a significant role in the continuing turmoil, alongside former Ba'athists loyal to Hussein. The analyst spoke on condition of anonymity.
But did not our troops report from the very first that many of the "fighters" they encountered were non-Iraquis? This would indicate the Al Queda scum were there first.
That more rats pour into the garbage dump when you flood their nest doesn't mean they weren't already there.
LOOK AT THE SOURCE- HIPAKISTAN.com. . What a JOKE.
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