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| Return to Afghanistan | | Foreign fidayeen behind rise in suicide attacks | | by Sebastian Rotella
The conflict in Iraq is drawing fewer foreign fighters as Muslim extremists turn their attention back to the symbolically important and increasingly violent turf of Afghanistan, say anti-terror officials in Europe and the United States.
The shift of jihadis to Afghanistan this year suggests that al-Qaida and its allies, armed with new tactics honed in Iraq, are coming full circle five years after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban mullahs.
Afghanistan’s historic allure to Islamic militants, the lawlessness of the Pakistani border region and the aggressiveness of the Taliban make for an ominous combination, anti-terror officials said.
Until Sept. 11, 2001, Afghanistan was the land of jihad: hallowed ground where fighters from across the Muslim world helped vanquish the Soviet Union in 1980s, fought alongside the Taliban in the 1990s and filled terror training camps overseen by Osama bin Laden. Loss of the Afghan sanctuary scattered the networks and sent bin Laden fleeing toward the Pakistani border region, where many anti-terror officials believe he remains.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, jihadis from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and Europe flocked to confront the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Although foreigners have been a minority in the Iraqi insurgency, militants such as Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi played a major role in spectacular suicide attacks and kidnap-murders.
But insurgent leaders in Iraq are now mainly interested in foreign recruits ready to die in suicide attacks, anti-terror officials say. Moreover, the conflict is dominated by sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. In contrast, an accelerating Afghan offensive by the resurgent Taliban offers a clearer battleground and a wealth of targets: U.S. and other NATO troops, and the Western-backed government.
As Iraqis have solidified control of their insurgency, the movement of foreign jihadis to Iraq has “significantly declined in recent months,” said Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of the DST, France’s lead counter-terror agency.
“There is less need for them in Iraq, because there’s a need above all for kamikazes and there are not an infinite number of volunteers,” Bousquet, whose agency works closely with U.S., European and Arab counterparts, said in a recent interview. “The Iraqi insurgency is now very well organized around Iraqis . . . Those who want to fight, but not necessarily to die as martyrs, go elsewhere.”
Simultaneously, Bousquet said, anti-terror agents have detected a new flow of militants heading to Afghanistan. Iraq attracted many Arabs including Saudis, Yemenis and Syrians, Bousquet said. Algerians, Tunisians and other North Africans made up the second-largest group. About 100 fighters from Europe have gone to Iraq over a three-year period, he said.
“Today they return to the route of Afghanistan, or the tribal zones of Pakistan, where clearly they are thriving,” Bousquet said. “Certainly there are some Europeans, but very few. In contrast, in Afghanistan there are certainly many Pakistanis and people from Arab countries and some from North Africa.”
A leap in violence in Afghanistan this year has featured tactics such as suicide and roadside bombings that are trademarks of the insurgency in Iraq, according to Bousquet and other officials. Despite decades of warfare, suicide bombings were rare in Afghanistan. But the number of such attacks has shot up from six in 2004 to at least 78 so far this year.
“Clearly, methods have been transposed in Afghanistan that did not exist during previous wars in Afghanistan,” Bousquet said. “Like suicide attacks. And that’s directly influenced by what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iraq.”
Jihadis from North Africa make the odyssey to Afghanistan through routes that converge in Pakistan, another senior French anti-terror official said.
“There’s a new route along which (North Africans) pass through Peshawar and down into Afghanistan to carry out operations,” the senior anti-terror official said. “And what’s new is the suicide operations. That’s not at all part of the Afghan mentality.”
North Africans have been detected traveling to Quranic schools in Quetta and Peshawar, said Louis Caprioli, who retired as chief of the DST’s anti-terror division in 2004. The jihadis use the schools as covers for their presence in Pakistan and as staging areas to cross into Taliban-dominated areas of Afghanistan, said Caprioli.
Foreign fighters are predominantly Sunni. But they increasingly prefer fighting alongside the Taliban to getting embroiled in the Sunni-vs.-Shiite bloodshed in Iraq, said Caprioli, who still works closely with the intelligence community as an executive of the Paris-based GEOS security company.
U.S. Special Forces officers in Afghanistan learned last year that Arabs were being trained as suicide bombers in Iraq, then traveling through Iran to Pakistan, according to an intelligence document on a computer drive smuggled out of a U.S. base in Afghanistan and sold at a bazaar in April. Extremists transported the aspiring bombers, mostly Yemenis and Syrians, from the city of Quetta across the border into Afghanistan, according to the document on the drive.
Basir Salangi, a police chief in eastern Nangarhar province, said Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis conduct suicide and other attacks in the border regions, but that attacks in Kabul are primarily carried out by Afghans who have been trained in Pakistan. And the combatants in Afghanistan still are overwhelmingly Afghans.
Afghan officials rarely have been able to offer proof of the presence of foreign militants by producing prisoners, identifying corpses or providing captured identity cards. Afghan officials allege that key training centers for the Taliban are in Quetta, Peshawar and Miramshah, and that militants use mountain routes in Paktia and Paktika provinces to cross the border.
“There are foreign fighters from several countries who have sanctuary and training in our neighboring country,” said Gen. Zahir Azemi, chief spokesman for the Afghan National Army, referring to Pakistan. Pakistani officials deny such allegations.
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