Here’s yet another story detailing how a country that is said to be a key ally in the United States war on terror is also playing another role but perhaps not in the way administration officials would like:
More than 40% of the foreign fighters who entered Iraq to join the insurgency in the past year were citizens of Saudi Arabia, America’s key partner in the Middle East, according to detailed information seized from a camp used by them. Documents and computers found by the US army at Sinjar, on the Iraqi-Syrian border, revealed that the other single largest group came from Libya, which is now being rehabilitated as a reliable western ally.
Overall, US officials reported that the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq this year dropped from 80-110 a month in the first half of the year to around 40 in October, partly due to the Sinjar raid.
The issue of foreign fighters is an important one, since U.S. military officials believe it is directly related to some of the more high-profile violence in Iraq:
After the raid the number of suicide bombings in Iraq fell to 16 in October – half the number seen during the summer months and down from a peak of 59 in March. US military officials believe that 90% of such bombings are by foreigners.
The captured data has been described as an intelligence treasure trove that included biographical details and the hometowns of the more than 700 fighters who entered Iraq since August 2006. Of those 307, or 41%, were Saudis and 137, or 18%, Libyans, senior US military sources told the New York Times.
Saudi Arabia, former home of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, has cracked down hard on al-Qaida in recent years. Saudi intelligence works closely with its US counterparts, but there have long been suspicions that the country’s most dangerous jihadis have gone to Iraq. “The border with Iraq is much more carefully controlled than it was 18 months ago,” said one British official. The Saudis also run extensive programmes “re-educating” and rehabilitating fighters who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan to see “the error of their ways”.
The US, Britain and others have praised the Saudis for their efforts, pointing especially to a recent appeal by the kingdom’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Asheik, who condemned “mischievous parties” who send young Saudis abroad to carry out “heinous acts which have no association with Islam whatsoever”.
The official comments from Saudi Arabia are laudable but what will be watched most in coming months in whether, in real terms, the Saudi government is imposing a crackdown on those “mischievous parties” who not only have helped fuel the violence in Iraq but who also helped man the planes that crashed murdered so many people and caused so much grief on 911 in New York and in Washington.
For more info about the issue of Saudi Arabia and terrorism click HERE.
A Cross Section Of Weblog Reaction:
Who would have thought that so many foreign fighters would have come from the main exporter of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia? They are our friend, right?
“The official said the number of foreign fighters has dropped off since the Sinjar raid. The U.S. military believes both Syria and Saudi Arabia in recent months have taken a number of actions to reduce the flow of foreign fighters.”
That’s nice of them, over four years into the war, though it certainly sounds like the Sinjar raid helped, too. And now, Libya has some explaining to do. “‘
When it comes to Iran, this administration continues to beat the drums of war. Every day we hear about the help they are giving insurgents in Iraq. It is, in fact, one of the excuses being used to start pumping up support for a strategic strike against them.
Yet, according to this NY Times article, documents found in a recent raid show it is Saudi Arabia and Libya that provide the most insurgents.
With friends like these…
And here we were thinking that the demonisation of Iran was purely political…In other news, it appears that (surprise, surprise) the occupation is provoking more violence than it is preventing….Surely, then, it is time for the largest contingent of ‘foreign fighters’ in Iraq – primarily of British and American origin, operating under the banner of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – to get back where they bloody came from.
Two good antiwar reasons to elect a progressive President in 2008:
A. Pro-war politicians trying to convince Americans to support a new war against Iran say that Iran should be bombed because it’s a source of foreign fighters attacking Americans in Iraq. However, of 25,000 people captured by the United States in Iraq and suspected of being foreign fighters, only 11 have been from Iran.
B. Files seized by American soldiers from an insurgent camp in the desert listed details of over 700 foreigners who had come to Iraq in order to fight during the last year. None of the foreign fighters listed in those files were from Iran. 41 percent were from Saudi Arabia, and 18 percent came from Libya. Those two countries are described as “allies” of the United States by the Bush White House. In spite of this striking lack of evidence for a strong presence of Iranians fighting Iraq, right wing politicians continue to push for war against Iran.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.