Bin Laden’s Iraq Plans

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At that meeting, according to Taliban sources, Osama bin Laden’s men officially broke some bad news to emissaries from Mullah Mohammed Omar, the elusive leader of Afghanistan’s ousted fundamentalist regime. Their message: Al Qaeda would be diverting a large number of fighters from the anti-U.S. insurgency in Afghanistan to Iraq. Al Qaeda also planned to reduce by half its $3 million monthly contribution to Afghan jihadi outfits.

All this was on the orders of bin Laden himself, the sources said. Why? Because the terror chieftain and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighboring countries such as Turkey, according to Taliban sources who complain that their own movement will suffer. (Though certainly not as much as Washington would like: last week Taliban guerrillas killed a U.N. census worker in an ambush, and a rocket struck near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul only hours after a visit by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.) Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the “American crusaders” and that the Iraqi insurgency has been “100 percent successful so far,” according to a Taliban participant at the mid-November meeting who goes by the nom de guerre Sharafullah.

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If true, bin Laden’s shift of focus could be unsettling news for George W. Bush. The president is eager to quell the Iraqi insurgency and establish a democratic, stable Iraq as he heads into the 2004 re-election campaign. Until now, the attacks on Americans and other Coalition members have come mainly from local Saddam loyalists rather than an influx of foreign jihadists. But if the Taliban sources are correct, bin Laden may be aiming to help turn Iraq into “the central front” in the war on terror. That is how Bush himself described Iraq in a September speech, when he said, “We are fighting that enemy today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets.” But the president may be getting more than he bargained for. With 79 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in November—far more than in any previous month—many Democrats now see Bush’s troubles in Iraq as the central front in their campaign to unseat him.

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http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3660179&p1=0

"Until now, the attacks on Americans and other Coalition members have come mainly from local Saddam loyalists rather than an influx of foreign jihadists"

MSNBC needs to check the facts, they loyalists were only part of the problem.


Saddam means squat at this point, if he had been caught earlier, it could have changed a lot.

I mean, no offence, but our spooks are hunting these
guys, and meanwhile MSNBC is chatting them up? And the
Mullah has an "official spokesman"? Is OBL a moron, so
he wants to give as much warning as possible as to his
intentions? Via MSNBC? About how he's dividing up his
revenues and stuff?