Posted on 05/28/2007 8:50:49 AM PDT by pabianice
Iraq’s militants go to other hot spots
The situation: The Iraq war is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond. The evidence: Militants in Iraq are turning out instruction videos and electronic newsletters on the Internet that lay out their playbook. The quote: ‘If any country says it is safe from this, they are putting their heads in the sand.’ — Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces
When Muhammad al-Darsi got out of prison in Libya last year after serving time for militant activities, he had one goal: killing Americans in Iraq.
A recruiter he found on the Internet arranged to meet him on a bridge in Damascus, Syria. When he got there, al-Darsi, 24, said the recruiter told him he was not needed in Iraq. Instead, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq.
A team of militants from Iraq had traveled to Jordan, where they were preparing attacks on Americans and Jews, al-Darsi said the recruiter told him. He asked al-Darsi to join them and blow himself up in a crowd of tourists at Queen Alia Airport in Amman.
“I agreed,” al-Darsi said in a nine-page confession to Jordanian authorities after the plot was broken up.
The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to U.S., European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.
Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. Others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for al-Darsi.
Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. Early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.
Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, said in a recent interview that “if any country says it is safe from this, they are putting their heads in the sand.”
Last week, the Lebanese army found itself in a furious battle against a militant group, Fatah al Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to Rifi. More than 30 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting the group at a refugee camp near Tripoli.
The army called for outside support. By Friday, the first of eight planeloads of military supplies had arrived from the United States, which called Fatah al Islam “a brutal group of violent extremists.”
The group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, was an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who was killed last summer. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, al-Abssi confirmed reports that Syrian government forces had killed his son-in-law as he tried crossing into Iraq to collaborate with insurgents.
Militant leaders warn that the situation in Lebanon is indicative of the spread of militant fighters. “You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act,” Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview Friday. “The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.”
A top U.S. military official who tracks terrorism in Iraq and the surrounding region, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said: “Do I think in the future the jihad will be fueled from the battlefield of Iraq? Yes. More so than the battlefield of Afghanistan.”
Militants in Iraq are turning out instruction videos and electronic newsletters on the Internet that lay out their playbook for a startling array of techniques, from encryption to booby-trapped bombs to surface-to-air missiles, and these manuals are circulating freely in cyberspace.
Tactics common in Iraq are showing up in other parts of the world. In Somalia and Algeria, for example, recent suicide bombings have been accompanied by the release of taped testimonials by the bombers, a longtime terrorist practice embraced by insurgents in Iraq.
It is perhaps not surprising that Jordan, the site of the failed airport plot, would be among the first countries to feel the effect of the war expanding beyond Iraq. The countries share a border, and Jordan is an American ally. Al-Zarqawi, who was Jordanian, is believed to have been behind a failed rocket attack on two U.S. Navy ships anchored off the coast of Jordan in 2005 and, later that year, suicide bombings at three hotels in Amman that killed 60 people.
Last week, President Bush asserted that in early 2005 Osama bin Laden ordered al-Zarqawi, his designate in Iraq, to organize terrorist attacks against the United States and other countries.
Whether the plot against the Amman airport last year was connected to al-Qaida is not clear. Some of the conspirators who were convicted in Amman in April told Jordanian investigators that bin Laden’s group sponsored their mission, although the investigation did not confirm any link, according to records of the case obtained by The Times.
However, the investigation did establish a connection between the people who planned the attack and militants from Iraq.
The terrorism is not exported from Iraq but is merely foreigners other than Iraqis that happened to stop by in Iraq to commit terrorist acts and are now going to other countries. Terrorist were not created by actions in Iraq but use Iraq as an excuse for their actions.
I wonder if the democrats know or even care that if we leave Iraq precipitiously, a la Vietnam, Iraqi refugees will follow us home...some with evil intentions.
Muslims going to muslim countries to kill muslims.
“Iraq’s militants go to other hot spots...”
Here is a great opportunity for the dems to proclaim that, if it weren’t for the war in Iraq, all would be peaceful in the rest of the world.
In Lebanon it’s muslims going to a muslim country to kill Christians...
The Islamic terrorists were setting up networks outside the Middle East before the Iraq war started - in the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, Bosnia, Thailand, Chechnya, Brooklyn, Germany, Pakistan, etc. etc. My goodness, where has this writer been all these years?
Why, in the name of God, is this man not under arrest?
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