A new, classified assessment by the CIA says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for extremists than Afghanistan was in al-Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for militants to improve their skills in urban combat.
The intelligence assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several congressional and intelligence officials. The officials said it made clear the view that the war in Iraq was likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and organized than they were before the war.
Congressional and intelligence officials who described the new assessment called it a detailed and thorough examination that included extensive discussion of the areas around the world that might be particularly prone to infiltration by combatants from Iraq, either Iraqis or foreigners.
They said the assessment had argued that Iraq, since the US invasion of 2003, had in many ways assumed the role played by Afghanistan during the rise of al-Qaeda during the 1980s and 1990s, as a magnet and a proving ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries.
The officials said the report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980s. It was during that conflict, which was primarily rural and conventional in nature, that the US provided arms and other support to Islamic extremists.
The assessment said the central role played by Iraq meant that, for now, most potential terrorists were likely to focus their energies on attacking American forces there, rather than carrying out attacks elsewhere, the officials said. But the officials said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries would soon have to contend with militants who leave Iraq equipped with considerable experience and training.
Previous warnings of this kind have been less specific and detailed, as when Porter Goss, the director of central intelligence, told Congress earlier in the year, in his annual report on terrorist trends, that jihadists who survive the continued fighting in Iraq would leave there "experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism," and might form "a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."
The officials who described the new assessment said they could not be identified by name, because of the classified nature of the document. The officials came from three different government organizations, and all said they had read the document.
The officials said the document did not address whether the anti-American insurgency in Iraq was indeed in the "last throes," as Vice President Dick Cheney said recently.
In an interviewwith Time magazine, Goss is quoted as saying that he believed that the insurgents were "not quite in the last throes, but I think they are very close to it."
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