The arrests in Jordan and Yemen of at least four Iraqi spies in two sleeper cells for plotting terror attacks on U.S. targets abroad has sparked investigations in nine other nations where Iraqi terrorists may be planning to attack American interests, according to an ABC News report.
The other nations are: the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
The cells in Jordan and Yemen were broken after an Iraqi agent attempted to recruit some local men to carry out bombing attacks inside Yemen, according to ABC. Instead, the men led authorities to the Iraqi agent as well as a “safe house” containing explosives.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher credited foreign law enforcement officers with seizing the terrorist material and throttling the planned attacks before they could be carried out. One of the Iraqi agents arrested fingered the others – two who were arrested in Jordan two weeks ago in connection with a plot to bomb a Marriott hotel, and another agent in Bahrain.
The terror plots in Yemen would have employed conventional explosives to target U.S. interests, a source told ABC. A Reuters story quotes a Bush administration official as saying chemical and biological weapons were not involved. “They were sitting there waiting for their instructions and had received such instructions,” the official said.
“Officers in the Iraqi intelligence service remain a threat because of their history of support for terrorism,” said Boucher in the ABC report. “The United States will continue to monitor this situation and work with our partners and allies to ensure the safety of American citizens at facilities overseas.”
To reduce the threat of Iraqi terror attacks on U.S. interests at home and abroad, U.S. officials have urged nations to expel their Iraqi diplomats and intelligence agents, based on “the significant threat posed by their presence,” Boucher said in an Associated Press account.
In fact, the U.S. has tried to neutralize the danger represented by its list of 300 alleged Iraqi secret agents by asking dozens of nations to arrest or expel them. Two were expelled from the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York, along with an Iraqi journalist.
Since the start of the war, further evidence has emerged of the linkage between Saddam Hussein’s regime and international terrorism – a point of contention in the run-up to the war, with many nations and individuals refusing to join the “coalition of the willing” due to the lack of a “smoking gun” linking Saddam to Osama bin Laden or to the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America.
Just yesterday, as WorldNetDaily reported, captured Iraqi soldiers told British military interrogators that members of al-Qaida were fighting alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces against U.S. and British troops near Basra. The members of bin Laden’s terror group were reported to be in the town of Az Zubayr, coordinating grenade and other attacks on coalition positions.
“The information we have received from POWs,” a senior British military source inside Iraq said, “is that an al-Qaida cell may be operating in Az Zubayr. There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us.”
Well before the current military operation began, it was widely reported – and satellite photos confirm – that Saddam had provided terrorists with a Boeing 707 fuselage in which to practice hijacking airlines without the use of firearms. Confronted about the camp by U.N. weapons inspectors, Baghdad claimed the terror training camp at Salman Pak was actually an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.
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