Al-Qaeda's New Home

By Romesh Ratnesar

The three men hailing a taxi late last Wednesday near Sulaimaniyah, a city in northern Iraq close to the Iranian border, didn't look like locals. They wore long, dark beards, for one thing and, though it was past midnight, didn't know where they were going. They first told the driver to take them into the city, then changed their minds and asked to be driven to a secluded suburb. Then they pulled guns on the driver and forced him out. "Do not look back," one of the strangers said, before speeding off. In any other part of the world, the crime might be deemed the work of low-level thugs, but in Iraq even minor incidents can take on sinister dimensions. After investigating the taxi driver's story, agents from the General Security Service in Sulaimaniyah reached a chilling conclusion: the three men may have been foreign militants who slipped into Iraq to stage a terrorist attack against U.S. forces and their allies. The next car bomb, the officials warn, might arrive in a taxi.

In Iraq today there's every reason to brace for the worst. The country was still reverberating last week from the shock of the attacks on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf when an explosion rocked the headquarters of the new Iraqi police force in Baghdad, killing one and injuring more than 20. Some Iraqis blamed loyalists of Saddam Hussein for the blast. But the bombing also bolstered fears about the deadly threat posed by small bands of foreign jihadists who have infiltrated the country with the intent of exploiting Iraqi discontent to launch a terror campaign aimed at driving the U.S. out of the country. While investigators have not yet fixed responsibility for the recent wave of attacks in Iraq, U.S. officials are convinced that a familiar nemesis is active there. "Yes, there are al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, though I wouldn't want to speculate on the numbers," Thomas Fuentes, a top FBI official in Iraq told TIME. "And yes, we do have al-Qaeda operatives in our custody." A U.S. official in the country says the al-Qaeda members in Iraq "almost certainly" number in the dozens.

Signs that al-Qaeda is gaining a foothold in Iraq are ominous, not just for the future stability of Iraq but for the Bush Administration's wider war on terrorism. In the two years since the attacks on New York City and Washington, the U.S. and its partners have wrought grave damage to Osama bin Laden's infrastructure of terror. The U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan destroyed al-Qaeda's training camps and scattered its operatives, while the international dragnet has rounded up more than 3,000 al-Qaeda members. Nearly every top pre--9/11 al-Qaeda leader other than bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and his security chief Saif al-Adel has been captured or killed--including the network's Southeast Asia kingpin and the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks. And yet al-Qaeda's lethal ambitions, its capacity to reinvent itself and its pool of willing recruits remain inexhaustible. "Al-Qaeda isn't just surviving," says a top Pakistani intelligence officer. "From this region, it's planning new attacks all over the world, wherever it can strike." The Department of Homeland Security warned last week that al-Qaeda strategists are still aiming to pull off "synchronized attacks against U.S. interests"--including another attack on targets inside the U.S. involving commercial airliners hijacked in nearby countries. A senior federal law-enforcment official told TIME that U.S. intelligence believes multiple al-Qaeda operations are "already in the can" and that an attempted attack somewhere in the world is imminent.

Some counterterrorism experts believe bin Laden's network remains too diffuse to pull off another 9/11--style spectacular inside the U.S. Al-Qaeda today is less a hierarchical enterprise than a sprawling outfit comprising small, loosely affiliated Islamist groups working independently of one another. Even so, "individuals and small groups can prove deadly, especially in places where chaos reigns," says a French counterterrorism official. Places, in other words, like Iraq. U.S. and foreign intelligence officials believe the presence of 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq has emboldened Islamist radicals to dispatch their minions there in order to create a new theater for jihad.

In the eyes of budding terrorists, Iraq presents an opportunity to prove their mettle by driving a superpower out of the Muslim world, as bin Laden's cohort did to the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. According to Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London, a majority of fundamentalist websites now list Iraq as the destination of choice for those interested in waging holy war for Islam, ahead of Palestine, Afghanistan and Chechnya. "It's an ideal environment," says Alani. "The cause of jihad is achievable in Iraq because you can hurt Americans easily and there is clear occupation."

What isn't clear, though, is whether the various foreign fighters who have managed to slip into Iraq are a coordinated force, or even how big the threat really is. Before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi officials claimed that as many as 6,000 foreign volunteers had entered Iraq to resist the U.S. invasion, but allied forces encountered only a fraction of that number on the road to Baghdad. An Iraqi intelligence source working with the CIA says the number of foreign militants active inside Iraq is in "the low hundreds," most of them drawn from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. U.S. military officials in Iraq acknow0ledge that they have failed to bottle up the southern and western borders with Saudi Arabia and Syria, which infiltrators can easily cross. Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told reporters last week that because of combat demands on U.S. forces, the borders are being guarded by just a 14,000-person Iraqi security force.

Once inside the country, says a Pentagon official in Iraq, "it's not hard for [infiltrators] to link up with fellow travelers." Sources inside the anti-U.S. resistance say foreign fighters have congregated west of Baghdad, in the conservative Sunni strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, where they receive shelter, food and weapons from local Islamic militants and members of the Fedayeen Saddam militia--though intelligence officials say there's no evidence of active collaboration between the outsiders and regime loyalists.

The most hospitable ally for al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq remains Ansar al-Islam, the militant group of Afghan-trained fighters that was based in northern Iraq before the war; hundreds of Ansar members fled to Iran after a U.S.-led assault on their base in March. Since then, says a security chief in Kurdistan named Khasraw, the Ansar fighters have returned to Iraq and established cells in Fallujah and Baghdad, with the aim to "attack U.S. interests everywhere on orders from outside, namely al-Qaeda." U.S. agencies believe that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a suspected al-Qaeda operative and senior Ansar official who allegedly ran a terrorist camp in northern Iraq before the war, recently returned to Iraq to coordinate Ansar's activities. According to the Iraqi newspaper al-Azzaman, al-Zarqawi recently sent a letter to members of his tribe in Jordan, urging them to attack U.S. and Jordanian targets.

Can the U.S. stop them? For coalition forces in Iraq, rooting out the terrorists and foiling future attacks will depend on reliable intelligence and the cooperation of local Iraqis, many of whom have expressed reluctance about being seen working with the U.S. out of fear of reprisals by anti-American thugs. But one hopeful development has been the revulsion voiced by Iraqis at the depraved tactics of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. "Before, I thought al-Qaeda only killed Americans," says Kadem Saleh, 33, a pilgrim in Najaf. "Now they are killing Iraqis. I say, 'Allah curse them.'" The U.S. still needs to convince more Iraqis that they're safe to do the same. --Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Aparisim Ghosh and Michael Ware/Baghdad, Helen Gibson/London, Scott Macleod/Cairo, Tim McGirk/Islamabad and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Bobby Ghosh and Michael Ware/Baghdad, Helen Gibson/London, Scott Macleod/ Cairo, Tim McGirk/Islamabad and Elaine Shannon/Washington