Saturday, July 23, 2005 Sunday Independent(UK):
Patrick Cockburn : Iraq has descended into chaos way beyond West's worst-case scenario
July 24 2005
By Patrick Cockburn http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=1042&fArticleId=2637594
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The shrill denials by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, that hostility to the invasion of Iraq motivated the bombers are demonstrably untrue. A soon-to-be-published investigation of 300 young Saudis caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qaeda or any other terror organisation before 2003. The invasion of Iraq made them decide to die.
Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same study commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by US-trained Saudi researcher Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalised by Iraq alone. <...>
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