Training grounds

Knight Ridder:

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists who could travel elsewhere across the globe and wreak havoc, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and classified studies by the CIA and the State Department.

Of particular concern, the officials and studies say, are the urban combat techniques being learned and used by foreign fighters assaulting U.S. and Iraqi troops. There's already evidence that those tactics are being replicated elsewhere.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James T. Conway told a Pentagon briefing last week that remotely detonated bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs - the insurgents' weapon of choice in Iraq - are an increasing threat to U.S. forces trying to stabilize Afghanistan.

The trend is "a little bit troubling," Conway said.

Iraq's emergence as a terrorist training ground appears to challenge President Bush's rationale for invading and overthrowing leader Saddam Hussein in March 2003.

"To complete the mission, we will prevent al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends," the president said in a nationally televised address last Tuesday.

But Iraq wasn't a source of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism under Saddam and played no role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.