Report: Al-Qaida fighting
alongside Saddam's forces

Captured Iraqi soldiers have told British military interrogators that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network are fighting alongside Saddam Hussein's forces against U.S. and British troops near Basra.

Specifically, the Iraqi POWs claim that about a dozen al-Qaida members are in the town of Az Zubayr, coordinating grenade and other attacks on coalition positions, according to a Scotsman report carried in several papers, including London's Financial Times.

"The information we have received from POWs today is that an al-Qaida cell may be operating in Az Zubayr," a senior British military source inside Iraq said in the report. "There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us."

3rd Infantry Division in firing positions during Iraqi approach

Around Basra, British forces destroyed some 14 Iraqi tanks yesterday, which had headed out towards the al-Faw peninsula. Fears that an attack on Basra would result in a bloody and protracted street battle caused military planners to avoid that course of action. And though the coalition invasion has reportedly reduced Iraqi forces in the area to 30 percent of their original strength, many have now insinuated themselves within civilian buildings in Basra.

Also, Basra has effectively lost communication with Baghdad, thanks to coalition raids that destroyed transmitters and took state radio and television off the air in the southern Iraq city.

Ordnance in hangar bay before loaded onto aircraft aboard USS Constellation

The implications of al-Qaida terrorists fighting with Iraqis against coalition forces, if confirmed, go far beyond tactical battlefield considerations. Many individuals and nations that refused to support the invasion of Iraq cited a lack of evidence that the regime of Saddam Hussein, brutal as it is, supports al-Qaida, the terror organization blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on America that killed almost 3,000 people.

Though many hold out for "smoking gun" proof of direct Iraqi complicity in 9-11, others feel a "smoking Boeing 707 fuselage" is sufficient proof of Saddam's support for international terrorism. It's been widely reported that Hussein provided terrorists a Boeing 707 fuselage in which to practice airline hijackings. Indeed, commercial satellite photos show the fuselage at the notorious terrorist training camp near a bend in the Tigris.

Specifically, says Iraqi defector Sabah Khalifa Alami, Iraqi intelligence trained groups at Salman Pak on how to hijack planes without weapons. It's not specifically known whether al-Qaida operatives trained at Salman Pak.

When confronted about the camp, Baghdad has repeatedly told U.N. inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.

Yossef Bodansky, who as former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare has been Congress' foremost terrorism expert, documents in his book "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America" how Saddam has supported al-Qaida for over a decade.