IRAQ - Falluja-Saudi Link.

After the Nov. 8 US assault on Falluja, 26 Wahhabi religious men in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa (religious decree) for Saudis and other Muslims to volunteer and fight the US in Iraq's Sunni city and elsewhere in the region. On Dec. 6, five Al-Qaeda militants stormed into the US consulate in Jeddah, killing five non-US staffers. Saudi forces killed four of the attackers. A Qaeda website later said: "Your brothers of the Squadron of the Martyr Abu Anas Al-Shami stormed one of the bastions of the American crusaders in the Arabian Peninsula, in Jeddah". The group called the attack "Operation Conquest of Falluja" and said: "This operation is one of the series of operations carried out by the Al-Qaeda Organisation for the Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula in their war against the crusaders and the Jews to chase the infidels out of the Arabian peninsula".

Abu Anas Al-Shami is the assumed name of Omar Youssef Jum'ah, a Jordanian religious man of the Wahhabi sect said to be of Chechen origin, killed in a US air strike in the Baghdad area on Sept. 22. He was described as the spiritual guide of Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda Organisation for Jihad in Mesopotamia, which was active in Falluja until November. Zarqawi had entered Iraq from Jordan last year and had in a fatwa justified the beheading of hostages by the members of his group.

In Saudi Arabia, the authorities claim to have broken the back of the Wahhabi militants. But the anti-regime and anti-US motivation of these militants remains as strong as ever. As in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia there have been reports of sections of the intelligence and security establishment being sympathetic to the militants. The militants look on Saudi Arabia as the rear base for their operations against the US-led occupation troops in Iraq.

The immediate priority of all jihadi groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia triangle is the continued bleeding of the Americans in Iraq. As the Lashkar-e-Toiba leaders keep pointing out during recruitment and fund-raising campaigns for Iraq in the mosques and madrassas (seminaries) of Pakistan, Iraq gives them an opportunity to defeat the only superpower in the world, just as they defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They keep stressing they should not miss this opportunity and that until they succeed they should focus on Iraq. Even though overthrow of the royal regime and taking of power in Saudi Arabia remains an important aim, they give it second priority after Iraq. The Jeddah incident indicates that Falluja has become the Tora Bora of Iraq. Towards the end of 2001, US troops thought they had cornered Osama Bin Laden and his followers in Al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountainous area of Afghanistan. After having asked the Pakistani army to seal the Pakistan-Afghanistan border effectively to prevent their escaping into Pakistan, they mounted an air and ground offensive to wipe out the jihadis. The operation was unsuccessful. While some Pakistani and South-East Asian members of groups were killed in US air strikes, most of the Arab members of Al-Qaeda, including Bin Laden and his No 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri managed to slip across the border into Pakistan, allegedly with the connivance of the Pakistani military intelligence.

South-East Asian survivors escaped by sea to Bangladesh. Pakistani and Arab jihadis dispersed into small groups and scattered across Pakistan. Some of the Arabs moved across to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs took shelter in South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan adjoining the border with Afghanistan. Just before the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, many of these militants - including Pakistanis belonging to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), Arabs belonging to Al-Qaeda and other Arabs of Chechen origin who were fighting in Afghanistan as members of the Taliban - moved across to Iraq via Saudi Arabia and Iran and started a jihad against the US and allied troops - sometimes in tandem with the Iraqi resistance fighters and, more often, independently.

Though Zarqawi is of Jordanian origin and has been portrayed by the US as the leader of foreign terrorists operating in Iraq, there is reason to believe that the foreign terrorists do not belong to a single organic group. A number of autonomous groups of different nationalities operate under individual leaders of the same nationality, who have remained unidentified. Periodic US claims of successes in operations against insurgents have been belied by the impunity and audacity with which terrorists have been able to operate in Iraq's Sunni Triangle.