LinkReport Says Iraq Is New Terrorist Training Ground
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 13, 2005; 7:45 PM
In a major new study, the CIA's National Intelligence Council says Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, officials at the CIA director's intelligence think-tank said today.
Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
Low's comments came during a rare public briefing by the NIC on its report of significant global trends looking out as far as 2020. But within the 119-page report is a startling frank evaluation of Iraq's place as a breeding ground for the new generation of Islamic terrorists, an evaluation that represents a consensus among terrorist experts throughout the world.
The al Qaeda membership "that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.
"At the moment," said NIC Chairman Robert L. Hutchings, Iraq "is a magnet for international terrorist activity."
Iraq also now joins the list of conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand, that has deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped to spread radical Islamic ideology.
At the same time, the report says that by 2020, al Qaeda "will be superceded" by other Islamic extremist groups that will merge with local separatist movements. Most terrorism experts say this is already well underway, and both the experts and the NIC say this kind of ever-morphing, decentralized movement is much more difficult to collect information about and to preempt.
Terrorists, who are able to easily communicate, train and recruit by using the Internet, will become "an eclectic array of groups, cells and individuals that do not need a stationary headquarters," the report says. "Training materials, targeting guidance, weapons know-how, and fund-raising will become virtual (i.e. online)."
The NIC is tasked with mid-term and strategic analysis and is a chief adviser to the director of central intelligence, who is also the CIA director. "The NIC's goal," one NIC publication states, "is to provide policymakers with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information -- regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to US policy."
Other than reports and studies, the classified NIC produces National Intelligence Estimates, which represent the consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies on specific issues. The NIC produced the much-criticized NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability prior to the war.
So ... nice work there, George.
