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Congress warned that Iraq is recruiting ground for terrorists

Washington Post

WASHINGTON – The Iraq insurgency continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent source of recruiting for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress on Wednesday.

“Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists,” CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism,” he said. “They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.”

On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.

“The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists,” Goss said in his first public testimony after becoming CIA director.

Goss said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who has joined al Qaeda since the U.S. invasion, “hopes to establish a safe haven in Iraq” from which he could operate against Western nations and moderate Muslim governments.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that he has trouble believing any of the estimates of the number of insurgents because it is so difficult to track them.

Rumsfeld said the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had differing assessments at different times, but that U.S. intelligence estimates of the insurgency are “considerably lower” than a recent Iraqi intelligence report of 40,000 hard-core insurgents and 200,000 part-time fighters. Rumsfeld told Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee’s ranking member, that he had copies of the CIA and DIA estimates but declined to disclose them because they are classified.