Black Elk wrote:

From the article:

The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier
this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could
provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language
proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and
for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."

Question: Since when has Black Elk taken the CIA's side on anything? Only
when if feeds your hate.

Answer: As long as it feeds his hatred for Bush. Otherwise, expect his
postings to cast aspersions about the CIA.

---

Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq

War radicalized most, probes find
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
July 17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an
Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the
backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to
fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these
foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the
war itself.

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture
available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's
claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are
terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central
front" in a battle against the United States.

''The terrorists know that the outcome [in Iraq] will leave them
emboldened or defeated," Bush said in his nationally televised address on
the war at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month. ''So they are waging
a campaign of murder and destruction." The US military is fighting the
terrorists in Iraq, he repeated this month, ''so we do not have to face
them here at home."

However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to
sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew
themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls
from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according
to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who
was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi
officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading
terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al
Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority
of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any
terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."

''Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, or Chechnya," the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters
analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including
six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the
report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center
in Herzliya, Israel.

American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity,
and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers
wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they were not Islamic
extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al Qaeda did four
years ago, but are part of a new generation of terrorists responding to
calls to defend their fellow Muslims from ''crusaders" and ''infidels."

''The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on
terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a
terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a
Washington think tank.

Foreign militants make up only a small percentage of the insurgents
fighting in Iraq, as little as 10 percent, according to US military and
intelligence officials. The top general in Iraq said late last month that
about 600 foreign fighters have been captured or killed by coalition
forces since the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. The wider insurgency, numbering
in the tens of thousands, is believed to consist of former Iraqi
soldiers, Saddam Hussein loyalists, and members of Iraq's Sunni Muslim
minority.

But the impact of the foreign fighters has been enormous. They are blamed
for the almost daily suicide attacks against US and Iraqi forces and have
killed thousands of civilians, mostly members of Iraq's Shia Muslim
majority. Their exploits have been responsible for much of the
headline-grabbing carnage recently, contributing to the slide in American
public support for the war.

There have been nearly 500 car bombings since the US-led coalition handed
over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government one year ago, US military
statistics indicate. In the last two months, car bombs and suicide
attacks have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the Associated
Press.

Bush has cited foreign fighters as a reason for continued US military
operations in Iraq. His argument, repeated often, is that ''the world's
terrorists" have chosen to make their stand in Iraq.

''Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power,
but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a
central front in the war on terror," Bush said in a radio address last
month.

Foreign fighters were found to be like Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Saud
Al-Fuhaid, according to Obaid's research, to be published by the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington this summer.
Described as in his early 20s, Fuhaid blew himself up March 24, three
days after he entered Iraq from Syria, according to newspaper accounts
and interviews with his family.

Obaid found little evidence Fuhaid was an extremist before the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Like many of the young men from Saudi Arabia who make
up the majority of the foreign fighters, the student at Imam University
in western Riyadh was not initially a radical jihadist, according to
information gleaned from Saudi newspaper accounts and intelligence
operations. In fact, he apparently almost changed his mind.

Fuhaid is believed to have traveled through Syria to fight in Iraq, but
once he arrived told his family he would be coming home instead,
according to a death notice published in Saudi newspapers and posted on
the Internet. ''However, during that time he met some friends of his who
were going to Iraq and told him they were going to declare Jihad with
their brothers in Iraq," the celebratory announcement said. ''It was at
that moment that our martyr changed his mind and told them that he will
go back to Iraq with them and called his parents to tell him he won't be
going home."

Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that
''the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV
and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a
cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a
responsibility to go."

Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and
North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families,
according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had
nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with
Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I am not
sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the
war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."

Case studies of foreign fighters indicated they considered the Iraq war
an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture, Paz said.

For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were largely
condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many religious leaders
in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promulgated fatwas, or
religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in Iraq is justified by the
Koran because it is defensive in nature. Last October, 26 clerics in
Saudi Arabia said it was the duty of every Muslim to go and fight in
Iraq.

''These are people who did not get training in Pakistan or Chechnya, [and
they] ended up going to Iraq because they considered defending Iraq a
must for every Muslim to go and fight," said Rita Katz, director of the
Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute in Washington and
an Iraq native.

One indication that a heightened degree of Arab solidarity is a leading
factor is that they are almost entirely Arabs and not Muslims from other
countries, such as those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia,
and Chechnya. Another motivation, the studies and analysts contend, is
the centuries-old struggle between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.
All the foreign fighters are Sunnis, according to the analyses, and many
of their targets are Iraq's majority Shia Muslims, who have gained
political power in Baghdad for the first time in hundreds of years.

Ali Alyami, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in
Saudi Arabia, said he believes the deep-seated Sunni-Shia rift among the
world's 1.2 billion Muslims -- about 1 billion of them Sunni -- best
explains the foreign-fighter phenomenon. He noted in an interview that US
policy makers do not seem to grasp the historic conflicts within Islam
that are playing out in the war in Iraq.

''To say we must fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in
Boston implies there is a finite number of people, and if you pen them up
in Iraq you can kill them all," said Bergen. ''The truth is we increased
the pool by what we did in Iraq."

Intelligence officials worry that some of ''Iraq alumni" will use the
relationships they build on the battlefields of Iraq and return to their
home countries as hardened Islamic terrorists.

The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier
this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could
provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language
proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and
for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."

http://tinyurl.com/e2nd8

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/07/17/study_cites_seeds_of_terror_in_iraq?mode=PF