IRAQ - Al-Qaeda Uses Iraq & The Internet For Growth.

Investigators now know who carried out the July 7 attacks in London and work on the assumption there would be further attacks. Their Qaeda co-ordinated assaults, which killed over 54 people and wounded over 700 others, were a revenge for Britain's part in the Iraq war. And, according to US assessments, the turmoil in Iraq has replaced the still-simmering conflict in Afghanistan as the chief recruiter of international Salafi jihadis. Analysts say anger over the Iraq conflict is helping to spread the ideology of global Salafi jihad to young Muslims in Europe.

It is the confluence of America's decision to invade Iraq and new communication technologies which has created the most powerful machine for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has tracked jihadi websites since the late 1990s. America and its allies are now facing a multi-front war: In Iraq, which is turning out a new generation of Arab jihadis; in Europe, where Muslim admirers of Al-Qaeda are embracing the Salafi cause because of anger over the Iraq war; and on the Internet, which has become a megaphone for Salafi ideology.

Counter-terrorism officials often talk about the phenomenon of "terrorist dispersal", which is when radicalised foreigners carry jihad and their guerrilla skills back to their homelands. But those responsible for the July 7 attacks in London were not veterans of the Iraqi insurgency. They were British subjects, three of whom of Pakistani origin with the fourth a Briton of Jamaican origin, all inspired by Al-Qaeda sympathisers who promise salvation and glory in exchange for violence and suicide operations - which they call "martyrdom", much as was the case with the Madrid blasts which killed 190 in March 2004.

Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the Research of Islamic Movements in Israel, was last week quoted as saying: "The world is just starting to understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university of jihad. Like the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be viewed as an export of the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of global jihad rather than on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world".

In the 1980s, the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, with its thousands of Arab fighters financed by the US and others, served as a potent rallying point for would-be "martyrs". Not only was Al-Qaeda (the base in Arabic) created from among these fighters, but clandestine videos of brave Mujahideen attacks were spread around the world. Today, videos and messages of support for jihadis spread much faster.

Insurgents in "martyrdom operations" appear on websites within days of attacks in Iraq, and the latest calls to carry jihad to Western capitals from the likes of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's No. 2 and Al-Qaeda's chief ideologue, spread around the globe within minutes. Toby Craig Jones, a political scientist and analyst of events in Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think tank based in Brussels, says: "Whatever framework we use to talk about Iraq - take Afghanistan for instance - it's whatever happened there, but on steroids. It seems to be proceeding much more quickly this time".

The majority of Muslims are as horrified by such attacks as anyone else, and a growing number of Muslim scholars are speaking out against the methods and motives the Salafi jihadis. But Salafi terrorism has never been a widespread phenomenon. Paz says: "If we're talking about percentages, maybe the supporters of global jihad are only 1% of the Muslim world". A Saudi ideologue who goes by the handle "Lewis Attiyatullah" online and with whom Paz held an e-mail correspondence until Lewis apparently went underground, spelled out what Al-Qaeda and its ideological allies saw as the benefits of the US presence in Iraq in an open letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair first published in April 2004. In his letter, Lewis said he expected that fighting in Iraq will create "a resistance that would develop into a culture of jihad", and that attacks must be made on Western capitals like London which have supported the war in Iraq. He also expressed pleasure about how Iraq, in his view, was inducting new members into the Salafi jihad, telling Blair. "I wish you could listen to what the returnees from Iraq say. Fighting the enemy became their greatest pleasure...this notion became like a virus for them".

The US military in Iraq estimates there are around 1,000 members of a Salafi insurgency which many others say numbers at least 15,000. But foreign fighters are suicide bombers, rather than Iraqi insurgents, a reflection of the extreme Salafi religious convictions which underpin their involvement. Paz calculated in a March 2005 paper that of around 200 documented suicide bombers in Iraq, 61% were Saudi.

In an assessment running through June by Kohlmann, of 300 foreigners reported killed in Iraq, 165 were Saudi, 38 were Syrian, 16 Kuwaiti, and 14 Jordanian. Kohlmann says nine Muslims from Europe have been reported killed in Iraq, one of them from Britain. Both Kohlmann and Paz expect that foreigners who survive the Iraq war are likely to carry the fight back to homelands like Saudi Arabia, a close US ally whose monarchy is frequently attacked on Salafi websites as being corrupt.

The foreigners in Iraq, based on "martyrdom wills" and websites linked to Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has been declared the head of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have few qualms about killing other Muslims. Paz says the frequency with which jihadis in Iraq are willing to justify the killings of civilians and Muslims is a sharp departure from the previous generation weaned on Afghanistan, which was brutal but generally had stricter limits on what were seen as legitimate targets. He says: "The Iraqi alumni are going to be more dangerous than the Afghan alumni. They have no limits, no red lines".