Breeding Jihadis - Near Enemy Vs Far Enemy.

The US presence in Iraq is a "cause celebre" for Neo-Salafi jihadis (holy warriors), as a recently declassified US intelligence assessment holds. But that does not mean the Iraqi insurgency is a wholly-owned al-Qaeda unit. Foreign fighters make up a relatively small part of the forces targeting the US military in Iraq. Most insurgents are Iraqi Sunnis or former members of Saddam's Ba'thist dictatorship. To bin Laden, Iraq might be more important as a symbol than a physical front or training ground. Fighting there may not produce as many hardened mujahideen eager to export jihad (holy war) as did the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

A new analysis of the evolving terrorist threat by the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says: "It is not obvious now how many Iraqi jihadists will support the global jihad of bin Laden and how many will focus their efforts on Iraq's fledgling state". The leak of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on terrorism trends to The New York Times, and President Bush's subsequent move to declassify the NIE's key judgments, has focused new attention on the relationship between the war in Iraq and global jihad. One NIE conclusion is that US involvement in Iraq has served as a recruiting sergeant for Neo-Salafi terrorism.

The NIE says: "Perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere... Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves...to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight". But the NIE - or at least the portions declassified so far - does not estimate how many of these jihadis are fighting in Iraq today, and how many may be members of terrorist cells elsewhere, looking to Iraq for inspiration.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terrorist, was a key insurgent leader able to rally Iraqi Sunni to his cause. Evidence suggests, however, that foreign fighters such as he are a small minority of the overall insurgent force. Maj Gen William Caldwell, chief US military spokesman in Iraq, recently said between 50 and 70 foreign fighters sneaked over the border into Iraq every month. Most come from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, or Syria. Between January and mid-September, US or Iraqi government forces captured some 630 foreign fighters, according to General Caldwell. Of these, 370 remain in detention in Iraq. The rest have been processed through Iraqi courts and sentenced, or released. Some may have been taken to undisclosed locations elsewhere. The total number of foreign fighters in Iraq is between 800 and 2,000, according to estimates by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

In contrast, the total strength of the insurgency is more than 20,000 people, according to Brookings. That means the vast majority of its fighters come from Iraq itself. Aidan Kirby, a terrorism expert at the CSIS, says: "In proportion to the whole insurgency, [the percentage of foreign fighters] is very small". On the one hand, this makes Iraq's effect on the global jihad of bin Laden unpredictable. The Afghan war against Soviet invaders in the 1980s created substantial numbers of battle-hardened Neo-Salafis. It is unclear whether Iraq will have an effect of the same magnitude. Some native Iraqi insurgents may become part of the larger "al-Qaeda central". But many more are likely to be uninterested in uprooting themselves to take the fight to other countries.

Numbers are not the sole indicator of the danger's scale. Already there are anecdotal reports of foreign fighters travelling back to Europe from Iraq, prepared to spread the jihad. Ms. Kirby of the CSIS says: "It really only takes a few people. They're acting as a force multiplier".

Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have seen some spillover of violence from Iraq inside their borders, notes a CSIS analysis of al-Qaeda. The death of Zarqawi may affect al-Qaeda's targeting. A charismatic leader with his own agenda, Zarqawi was focused on attacking "the near enemy", according to Brian Fishman, a scholar at the US Army's Combating

Terrorism Centre. And Zarqawi's near enemy was the apostate Arabs in the Middle East, notably the Shi'ites and liberal Sunnis. But Bin Laden emphasises "the far enemy" - the US and the West. "Zarqawi's death may actually strengthen the negotiating position of jihadists dedicated to attacking the US homeland", writes Fishman in an article in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly.