Vivisecting the Jihad.

• Author: Debat, Alexis

ONE OF THE most crucial and controversial questions confronting Western counter-terrorism analysts revolves around the possible transformation of Iraq from an obscure footnote to a crucial battlefield in the War on Terror. The recent fighting in Fallujah has shed a new light on a category of insurgents that coalition officials refer to as "foreign fighters", whose ideological identity strikes at the heart of this line of argument. 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 mujabeddin 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 by U.S. forces, Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi police 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. (1) 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 AI-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, 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 northeast 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...