U.S. Warns Iraq: Beware Of Foreign Troops In Your Country

by Peyman Pejman

The issue is not new. During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the former dictator hosted a number of such groups in the 1970s and 1980s, except that few ordinary Iraqis knew about it.

The last known terrorist staying in Iraq was the Palestinian Abu Nidal, who Iraqi officials claimed committed suicide in August 2002, although his body showed multiple gunshots to the head.

But before the invasion of Iraq in March, Washington had only spoken of Ansar al-Islam, a Muslim fundamentalist group of about 1,000 men who had camped out in the north-eastern parts of Iraq, along the border with Iran.

Washington claimed the group had ties with al-Qaeda, which it blames for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and bombed its camps. Half of the members are believed to have died while the others reportedly escaped to Iran.

But in recent months, U.S. Administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer has repeatedly warned of the presence of "foreign terrorists" in the country, of which he has said there are "several varieties around."

He pointed the finger at Ansar al-Islam, and has said that the group was planning a major comeback and possibly major attacks. Washington and U.S. officials have already said the group might have been behind the August car bombing in front of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, in which some 70 people were killed and wounded. They add that there are indications it might also have been involved in the bombing Tuesday night in the Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq. Scores of people, including several U.S. Department of Defense employees, were wounded in the car bombing.

Speaking on the Aug. 19 attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, he said that preventing such attacks poses the greatest challenge to the intelligence community.

"Iraq has become a new field of battle in this worldwide terrorist fight," Bremer said in late August. "And therefore we will continue to refine our intelligence."

"But there is no such thing as 100 percent security against terrorism. And what we have to do is raise the threshold as high as we possibly can for terrorism, make it as difficult as possible for them," said Bremer, who was at one point chairman of the U.S. National Commission on Terrorism and ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism.

But the notion of having foreign terrorists is a new one for many Iraqis, and one that they feel uncomfortable about, primarily for two reasons.

First, Iraqis are highly nationalistic people and they would like to believe that any resistance to the occupation of their country comes from within their ranks.

"Iraq has had a long history of fighting foreigners and fighting for its own rights. Two things have mattered most in this country: God and country," Hassan, an elderly Iraqi man, said in an interview in Baghdad. "We don't need anyone's help."

That sense of nationalism has shown up repeatedly in videotapes sent to Arabic television channels by underground Iraqi resistance groups. That message has invariably been the same: We are Iraqis and will fight foreigners.

The message has also popped up in messages purportedly sent by Saddam Hussein, hoping to arouse this sense of nationalism in his countrymen and inviting them to resist "the foreign occupiers."

But as Bremer has pointed out in the past, insecure grounds are perfect breeding atmosphere for terrorism.

Lebanon would be a good case in point, where for almost two decades home-bred militias and international groups that carried out terrorist acts roamed the streets freely.

With help from states such as Iran and Syria, they kidnapped many westerners and destroyed much of the country in senseless rounds of car bombings and pitched battles.

Since taking power, one of Bremer's main challenges -- and one that many would argue he has failed in -- is restoring security to Iraq, a country notorious for order and control under decades of dictatorship.

Unlike in Lebanon, people like Abu Nidal were confined to their state-defined quarters in Iraq. The result was that ordinary Iraqis were unaware of their presence on their country's soil.

"There were so many things going on in this country that we had no idea about and were shocked by," said a young Iraqi woman in Baghdad. "It was only after the fall of the regime that I saw videotapes about babies being tortured and killed. I had never heard of the name Abu Nidal before the war and apparently he was living in my country for many years."

Abu Nidal, who had been a guest of Saddam Hussein, supposedly refused the then Iraqi leader's request that he train al-Qaeda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan and carry out attacks against the United States and its allies, according to reports attributed to Iraqi opposition groups at the time.

The second reason ordinary Iraqis feel uncomfortable accepting that foreign terrorists might be operating from their country is the suspicion many feel about neighboring countries or people from other Arab countries. They speak of these sentiments openly.

After all, this is a country that was officially in war for almost nine of the 24 years Saddam was in power. For an additional 12 years, many Iraqis blamed much of the world for turning a blind eye to what they saw as the UN economic sanctions destroying their country.

"Iraq has had a hard time in the past. People suffered a lot under Saddam and countries around us took advantage of us. They treated us like dirt, be they the Iranians, the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, or the Saudis, not to mention the Americans and the British people," said one Iraqi man who has put his business on hold temporarily to work as a driver for foreign correspondents in Baghdad.

In a country where anything the U.S.-led forces say or do is initially met with deep suspicion, Bremer and his advisers might well have to show more of the evidence they claim to have.