"Foreign Fighters," Terrorism and the Iraqi Handover

Alexis Debat

Until recently understood as a disparate group of several hundred non-Iraqis, the “foreign fighter” phenomenon has recently emerged as a more cohesive force, structured around a core of Islamic militants themselves a product of the Sunni-jihadist underground that gave the world Chechnya and Afghanistan. This has led the Bush Administration to reassess their potential to destabilize Iraq after the “handover of sovereignty” on June 30, especially in the wake of the recent uprising in the Sunni areas.

While relatively irrelevant from a military point of view, the basic question of how many jihadists are currently operating in Iraq could have devastating political implications. Depending on its scale and quality, Iraq’s mujaheddin factor is either an anomaly or a tumor, a marginal and strictly military glitch, or the opening of the deadliest chapter yet in the war on terror.

We have some statistics to help us sort through this morass. Approximately 300 individuals carrying non-Iraqi passports have been arrested in the past 14 months, according to senior U.S. military sources. The first wave of these “foreign fighters” (between April and October 2003), was mainly composed of Arab volunteers from neighboring countries, most of them Palestinian refugees enlisted to enter the struggle either by the remnants of the Iraqi mukhabarat or any number of terrorist organizations before and during the war in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The second wave, which seems to be growing in size, is composed mostly of Islamic militants recruited throughout Europe and the Middle East and then sent to Iraq through the same elaborate human pipeline used by the mujaheddin to send volunteers to the Balkans, Chechnya and Afghanistan in the 1990s. On November 19, 2003, the New York Times quoted American government sources as estimating the “foreign fighters phenomenon” to number between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals. A more reasonable approximation currently being floated by U.S. and British intelligence analysts puts the overall force at between 300 and 500 “foreign volunteers”, most of them Islamic militants, and spread in small cells of between five and eight operatives. This fits the modus operandi of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The second wave of “foreign fighters” poses a major threat to U.S. strategic goals in Iraq. Once poorly structured and exclusively military in nature, this cluster is now streamlining around a few organizations linked to foreign jihadist networks strongly intent on investing in the future of the country’s Sunni minority past the June 30 handover. According to European and American intelligence sources, Ansar Al-Islam leads this second wave of “foreign fighters.” Founded in Afghanistan’s Herat training camp around 1998, this international terrorist organization is loosely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, to which some experts say it aspires to succeed. Ansar Al-Islam has a strong history of activity in Iraq, where it operated training camps in the country’s north-east before the war, beyond the reach of Saddam Hussein, and along the border with Iran, where some of its members have sought refuge in the past year. But its reach is impressive: the group has been mentioned in just about every terrorist plot uncovered in Europe in the past 15 months. With its infrastructure damaged in Iraq, the organization has retreated to Georgia, Turkey and western Europe, where it is re-organizing its networks around one objective: recruiting and sending dozens of volunteers to fight under the banner of its new Iraqi branch, Jaish Ansar Al-Sunna.

According to senior British intelligence officials, Ansar’s Iraqi branch was formally established last November in Baghdad. The organization is reported to rely on between 100 and 150 members operating mainly in Kurdistan, as well as the Sunni triangle and the Baghdad area. Like other terrorist organizations in Al-Qaeda’s orbit, it focuses on large suicide operations. It has claimed responsibility for the February 1, 2004 bombings in the northern city of Irbil that killed 109 people, and the February 13, 2004 suicide attack on the police station in Kirkuk, which killed seven policemen. Assisting Ansar abroad is Al-Tawhid, a group established in Kabul in the late 1990s to provide support to Jordanian volunteers trained at Al-Qaeda’s camps in Herat. Now operating largely out of the UK and Germany, it provides other jihadist groups with the logistical base necessary to smuggle scores of mujaheddin into Iraq since the fall of Saddam.

This connection is crucial: in a recent German intelligence document, one of Al Tawhid’s main operatives in Germany ranks the forging of passports as “the most important activity” of the organization in Europe. Almost all of these smuggling networks then run through safe-houses in Istanbul and Damascus and on to Iraq with the help of smugglers operating along the porous border, especially in the many wadis of the Al-Qa’im district and in the vicinity of Al-Rutbah and Qusaybah, two longtime smuggling hubs. Volunteers from Middle Eastern countries also enter the country from Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

These entry points offer a relatively safe and direct access to Al-Anbar province and the Sunni triangle, especially the flashpoint towns of Ramadi and Fallujah, as well as Baghdad’s Al-Moalemeen and Yarmuk neighbourhoods, where these Sunni jihadists can then disappear into the Ba’athi underground.

Both Ansar and Al-Tawhid are headed by a 38-year-old Jordanian Bedouin known as Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who took responsibility for the beheading of Nicholas Berg in retaliation for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in May (in fact, it is highly probable that he was the actual executioner). A former protégé of Omar Ibn Al-Khattab and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in Afghanistan, Ahmad Fadl Al-Khalayleh—his real name—has been linked directly or indirectly to about two dozen terrorist plots world-wide since 1999, as well as several suicide bombings in Iraq and a foiled chemical plot in Baghdad in late January 2004. Despite his extensive training in Afghanistan—especially with chemical weapons—and his past allegiance to Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi is establishing himself both as an alternative and a successor to Osama bin Laden. According to the debriefing transcripts of several senior Al-Tawhid operatives in Europe, Zarqawi has been criticizing Bin Laden with increased vehemence since 2002. His intention to commit acts of terror inside Iraq has been further confirmed by the capture of two of his top lieutenants in January 2004. One of them, Hassan Guhl, a Pakistani veteran of Al-Qaeda operations captured in Kurdistan, was carrying a cd-rom allegedly containing a 17-page “progress report” from Zarqawi to the leadership of Al-Qaeda which claimed that the group had been responsible for 25 terrorist attacks (almost all major assaults against U.S. forces) and solicited Bin Laden’s consent and support to turn Iraq into a “field of jihad”, in part by stirring up religious strife between the Sunnis and the Shi’a. If genuine, the letter is another piece of evidence that suggests Zarqawi is planning to use Jaish Ansar Al-Sunna as a vehicle for his premeditated “third act” in Iraq.

Another consequence of the Iraq War one year on is the post facto alliance between the heretofore fiercely independent foreign mujaheddin (and, in particular, Zarqawi’s men) and the remnants of their former enemy, the Ba’ath Party. This alliance is much less artificial than it appears. Contrary to popular belief, radical Wahhabi militants had built a powerful, if discreet, movement in Iraq through the 1980s and 90s. Centering on several mosques, like Ibn Taymiyah in Yarmuk, this fundamentalist Sunni underground was built around a handful of charismatic clerics such as Madhi Al-Soumaydai, who is now considered its main leader. Despite Saddam’s ruthless repression, this movement not only survived but thrived, thanks to Saudi funds and the popular appeal of Islam facilitated by the considerable impoverishment of the country due to the 1990s sanctions regime and consequent criminalization of the Iraqi economy. It built a small but powerful following in the army, even enlisting one of the generals heading the mukhabarat (reportedly married to a member of Saddam’s clan). When the regime collapsed, these officers openly joined the movement, and now manage the crucial interface between the Ba’athi underground and the jihadists. (When coalition forces raided Ibn Taymiyah in January 2004 and arrested Al-Soumaydai and 31 suspected “foreign fighters”, they uncovered a large cache of weaponry and explosives.)

Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources suspect that former officers of the mukhabarat’s m14 section (responsible for monitoring the activities of terrorist groups inside Iraq and beyond) have used their experience in navigating the intricate Sunni fundamentalist underground of the Middle East to co-opt some of them with the rhetoric of protecting Iraq’s “Sunni identity” against the Shi’a and the Iranian threat.

On the ground, the strategy of integrating the fundamentalists with the secularists has made it difficult to assign blame to specific groups for particular terror operations inside Iraq. But as the attacks multiplied and the resources devoted to tracking Saddam and his elusive wmd were reassigned to fight the insurgency, U.S. intelligence analysts have been able to build a general typology. Most of the small-scale but deadly roadside bombings, sniper and rpg attacks against coalition troops are the work of a mixture of former regime elements, Arab volunteers and ordinary Iraqis; by contrast, most of the large-scale suicide bombings have been squarely attributed to groups dominated or heavily infiltrated by Islamic militants.

This suggests a rigorous division of labor between Ba’ath types and jihadists where the former provide money, explosives and logistics while the latter provide the foot soldiers and suicide bombers. None of this is good news for the American-led coalition. Not only are terrorist organizations linked to the global mujaheddin underground slowly taking over the insurgency itself, but they are pushing to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before autumn 2001: a public relations windfall for their ideologues, a training ground for their “rookies”, and even a safe-haven for their leadership. While this somber horizon is still taking shape, its potential implications must be thought through. Iraq’s transformation into a new “field of jihad” will force the U.S. government to abandon the long-term requirements of building a modern and multi-confessional Iraq and focus on the short-term necessities of waging direct war on terror.

Alexis Debat, a former official in the French ministry of defense, is a consultant on terrorism for abc News and a senior analyst for the Institut Montaigne in France. He is at work on a comprehensive history of the Central Intelligence Agency. This essay is adapted from an article, "Vivisecting the Jihad", which appears in the Summer 2004 issue of The National Interest.