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Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq

[New York Times] Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet - When Muhammad al-Darsi, 24, met his recruiter in Damascus, Syria, he was told he was not needed in Iraq. Instead, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq. A team of militants from Iraq had traveled to Jordan, where they were preparing attacks on Americans and Jews. Darsi was asked to join them and blow himself up in a crowd of tourists at Queen Alia Airport in Amman. "I agreed," Darsi said in a nine-page confession to Jordanian authorities after the plot was broken up. The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond. Last week, the Lebanese Army found itself in a furious battle against Fatah al-Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, general director of the Internal Security Forces in Lebanon. "You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act," said Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain. In an April 17 report written for the U.S. government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan because Iraq had become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics.
2007-05-28 01:00:00
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