Al Qaeda's Golden Opportunity

The American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has provided Al Qaeda with a new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide. Statements by Al Qaeda top chiefs, including bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi and Seif al-Adl, portray the unfolding confrontation in Iraq as a "golden and unique opportunity" for the global jihad movement to engage and defeat the United States and spread the conflict into neighboring Arab states in Syria, Lebanon and the Palestine-Israeli theater.

The global war is not going well for bin Laden, and Iraq enabled him to convince his jihadist followers that Al Qaeda is still alive and kicking despite suffering crippling operational setbacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere.

Several points should be highlighted. First, it is difficult to accurately assess the precise military strength and weight of Al Qaeda in Iraq in relation to various components of the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraqi resistance is highly complex, diverse and decentralized, with a broad spectrum of ideological orientations and perspectives. Although a consesus exists that the overwhelming number of fighters are home-grown Iraqis (more than 90 percent) inspired by nationalist and religious sentiments, foreign fighters reportedly play a bigger role than their miniscule size because of their spectacular suicide bombings against Iraqi security forces, Shiites and Sunni Kurds.

A related point is that while American and Iraqi authorities estimate the number of Arab fighters under Zarqawi around a 1,000, his biographer, who has access to Zarqawi's inner circle, claims that the latter has built a force of at least 5,000 full-time fighters bolstered by a vigorous network of 20,000 homegrown supporters.

The numbers vary wildly and cannot be authenticated accurately but one point must be reiterated: the number of foreign militants represents a small percentage -- perhaps one in 10 -- of the total indigenous Iraqi fighters. Nonetheless, Al Qaeda in Iraq has proved to be deadly effective and has become a power to be reckoned with.

A related point is that the expansion of the American "war on terror," particularly the invasion and occupation of Iraq, radicalized a large segment of Iraqi society and Arab public opinion and played directly into the hands of Al Qaeda and other militants. "Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment," U.S. Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2005.

Far from hammering a deadly nail in the coffin of terror, as Bush had stated, Iraq appears to have become a recruiting tool, if not yet a recruiting ground, for militant jihadist causes and anti-American voices. A consensus exists among American, European, and Arab analysts (and the American intelligence community) that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next or second generation of "professionalized" jihadis and that it provides them with the opportunity to enhance their technical skills.

A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says that Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for militants than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat. A small group of Arab fighters trained in Iraq has already made its violent debut in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Iraq is slowly and gradually replacing other theaters as a forward base for the new jihad. Today, a large concentration of active jihadis exists in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. According to a 2005 report by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank: "The al-Qa'ida 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." This report took a year to produce and includes the analysis of 1000 U.S. and foreign specialists, and represents the conclusion of American intelligence, which cannot be dismissed as politically and ideologically biased and antiwar.