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| Afghanistan |
| Increase in Afghan attacks due to Iraqi alumni |
| 2006-04-02 |
| Islamic extremists in Iraq are providing military training and other assistance to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from eastern and southern Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, U.S. intelligence officials told Knight Ridder. A small number of Pakistanis and Afghans are receiving military training in Iraq; Iraqi fighters have met with Afghan and Pakistani extremists in Pakistan; and extremists in Afghanistan increasingly are using homemade bombs, suicide attacks and other tactics honed in Iraq, said U.S. intelligence officials and others who track the issue. Several Afghan and Pakistani "exchange students" volunteered to join the fight against American and Iraqi forces in Iraq, but they were told to return to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train others there, two U.S. intelligence officials said. They and other officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the intelligence is highly classified. Intelligence suggests that if the trend continues, U.S. forces, already contending with escalating violence in Iraq, could face the same thing in Afghanistan in the coming months, further complicating the Bush administration's plans to withdraw some troops. "The worst case," one U.S. intelligence official said, "would be if the terrorists in both places are becoming more connected, and that they either want to take some of the heat off the jihadists in Iraq or that they figure we're stretched too thin in both places, so they're going to try to turn up the heat in both." Seth Jones, a specialist on Afghanistan at the Rand Corp., a consulting firm that advises U.S. government agencies, said: "I think there is absolutely no question that the partial evidence strongly suggests that there have been increasing contacts between Afghan insurgents and Iraqi insurgents either in Iraq itself or in Pakistan; the trail is going in both directions." Extremists traveling to or from Iraq mostly are making their way on routes used by drug traffickers and smugglers through Pakistan's province of Baluchistan, where government forces are facing a tribal insurgency, and southern Iran, the two American intelligence officials said. They said there was no solid evidence that Iran's Islamic regime was arranging, financing or aiding what one of the U.S. intelligence officials called "terrorist Route 66." Afghanistan has witnessed a surge in attacks by the Taliban, many of them apparently aimed at testing NATO troops from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands as they begin taking over security duties in the south from American forces. Tactics that have proved effective in Iraq, especially homemade bombs, suicide and car bombs, and secondary ambushes - in which troops, police and emergency workers are hit as they respond to an initial attack - increasingly are being used in Afghanistan, they said. "Everybody accepts that there has been a qualitative shift in the sophistication of these attacks," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence expert who is now at the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan research center. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 What? Things got a bit too "boring" in Iraq that they decided to move on to something "more exciting"? |
| Posted by: Ptah 2006-04-02 20:35 |