Iraq war spawned radicals, studies find
Brian Bender - Boston Globe
Sunday, July 17, 2005

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

The studies, which together comprise 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 in Iraq are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the "central front" in a battle against the United States.

The U.S. military is fighting the terrorists in Iraq, Bush said 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 Muslim clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid.

He is a U.S.-trained analyst commissioned by the Saudi government and was 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-Qaida operatives 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."

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 and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq.

Before the Iraq war, they were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as al-Qaida did four years ago, but they 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.

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

"The vast majority of them had nothing to do with al-Qaida before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with al-Qaida today," he said.

"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."