The good news is there appears to be something of an “exodus” of terrorists leaving Iraq. The bad news is they’re leaving because they’ve finished their training and are now prepared to wreak havoc elsewhere.
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 American, 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. But 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 Mr. Darsi.
Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But 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.
Most of the White House’s Iraq rhetoric, particularly during the fight with Congress over war funding, emphasizes the significance of preventing Iraq from becoming a launching pad for terrorism. If we withdraw from Iraq, Bush and others argue, terrorists will establish training camps, create a base of operations, and launch attacks elsewhere.
What Bush and his allies neglect to mention is this is already exactly what’s underway in Iraq right now. Insurgents are treating Iraq as some kind of Terrorism School, and are applying the lessons they’ve learned after graduation.
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 General 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 Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed last summer. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Mr. 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 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 on 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.”
It’s hardly limited to Lebanon. Saudis recently arrested 172 alleged terrorists plotting attacks in Saudi Arabia, and some of the suspects had been trained in Iraq. European officials are monitoring groups of Muslim men who apparently fought alongside insurgents in Iraq, and then return to Europe with new skills. Plots have unfolded in Jordan, Somalia, and Algeria, all with trademarks from Iraq.
A top American 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.”