Determing Potential - Third Superpower

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Determing Potential

Authored by Michael Pate on February 27th, 2004 at 12:46 PM

Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists where novice recruits develop their skills, junior operatives hone their organizational and planning capabilities, and relations mature between individuals and groups as was the case during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and extremist operations in the Balkans, - Lowell Jacoby

The war in Iraq and US policy toward the Muslim world has enhanced extremists ability to recruit and offered them a new training ground. - Michael Watkins

Iraq is now a “potential” training ground for terrorists?

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. - George W. Bush

Most of the administration’s public assertions have focused on a supporter of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is believed to have run terrorist training camps in both Iraq and Afghanistan and received medical care in Baghdad. - John Solomon

According to a sensitive reporting [from] a “regular and reliable source,” [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz. - US Government Memo

From one peak, we could see the village of Biyara, which sits in a valley between Halabja and a wall of mountains that mark the Iranian border. Saddam’s tanks were an hour’s drive away to the south, and Iran filled the vista before us. Biyara and nine other villages near it are occupied by the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters of Islam. Shinwe, in fact, might be called the axis of the axis of evil. We were close enough to see trucks belonging to Ansar al-Islam making their way from village to village. The commander of the peshmerga forces surrounding Biyara, a veteran guerrilla named Ramadan Dekone, said that Ansar al-Islam is made up of Kurdish Islamists and an unknown number of so-called Arab Afghans—Arabs, from southern Iraq and elsewhere, who trained in the camps of Al Qaeda. - Jeffrey Goldberg

Personally, I think that is an improvement from what it used to be. And that there is there is nothing “new” about it.

Links in this entry:

Al Qaeda's changing threat to US
Case Closed
Intelligence Community Assessments of Terrorist Threats
President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours
The Great Terror
U.S. Sees Some Iraq Contact With al-Qaida

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