Guardian : Iraq war created a terrorist flood, American spymasters warn Bush

Iraq war created a terrorist flood, American spymasters warn Bush

by Paul Harris in Washington and Peter Beaumont in Baghdad | September 24, 2006

America's spy agencies have concluded that the invasion of Iraq has created a flood of new Islamic terrorists and increased the danger to US interests to a higher level than at any time since the 9/11 attacks.

This grim assessment is provided in a classified intelligence document called the National Intelligence Estimate, large parts of which have been leaked to the New York Times. The report is the largest US intelligence survey of the global terror threat carried out since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Its conclusion will surprise few critics of the Iraq war or US policy against terrorism. It is, however, a sharp contrast to the message often coming out of the White House and provides a far more harrowing assessment of terrorism than a congressional report published last week.

The White House and senior Republicans often say their tough line has made America safer over the past five years. This report indicates that America's spymasters disagree with that opinion, and its findings could embarrass President George Bush in the run-up to November's crucial midterm elections.

The study represents a consensus opinion of 16 different intelligence organisations. Entitled 'Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States', it was completed last April. Its stark warning is that the threat from Islamic terror groups and their jihadi philosophy has spread across the world.

The New York Times quoted one intelligence official as saying the report describes the invasion and subsequent conflict in Iraq as one of the major factors behind this spread. It says the threat from radical Islam does not now come from a tight-knit core of al-Qaeda terrorists commanded from a central organisation or group of leaders, such as those that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Instead jihadi ideas have spread to create a new class of terrorists who are 'self generating' and can create terror cells capable of carrying out an attack without much outside help.

In Iraq, Sunni extremists marked the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan yesterday by killing at least 37 Shias, many of them women, in a bomb attack on people queuing for cooking fuel in Sadr City, a slum in the east of Baghdad. The bomb - planted in a barrel - exploded, detonating the truck and enveloping them in a fireball.

A Sunni extremist group claimed it carried out the attack as a reprisal for murders by Shia death squads.

Student Dhiyaa Ali, 24, ran to help the victims and found bodies and blood everywhere. He said: 'I went into the flames to get anyone left out of the fire. I saw a mother holding her child, both of them burnt and dead.'