British intelligence received reports ahead of the Iraq war saying Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi seeded Baghdad with "sleeper cells" to attack U.S.-led forces, and that he may have received chemical and biological weapons from northern Iraq. The report, released Wednesday as part of a review of British intelligence and based on information available just before the war, raises the question of why U.S. forces were not better prepared for a growing insurgency that has used tactics mentioned in the report, such as car bombs, to devastating effect. "There were manifold planning failures ... and this was just one of them," said Steven Simon, a senior analyst at the RAND Corp. think tank and co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, a book about the rise of al-Qaida.
Bush administration officials have said that planning for the security of postwar Iraq has been mostly successful, but they also have acknowledged underestimating the strength of guerrilla forces. Al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida-linked terrorist network is one of the most dangerous groups fighting the U.S.-led forces in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi has threatened to kill Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and claimed responsibility for the beheading of American citizen Nicholas Berg. The report quotes British intelligence as saying that information from February 2003 — just before the war — "suggests that senior al-Qaida associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad, to be activated during a U.S. occupation of the city."
"These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons. (It is also possible that they have received CB materials from terrorists in the KAZ)," referring to chemical and biological materials and the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. |