NYT: Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq

[uberllama42]

When Muhammad al-Darsi got out of prison in Libya last year after serving time for militant activities, he had one goal: killing Americans in Iraq.

A recruiter he found on the Internet arranged to meet him on a bridge in Damascus, Syria. But when he got there, Mr. Darsi, 24, said the recruiter told him he was not needed in Iraq. Instead, he was drafted into the war that is seeping out of Iraq.

<snip>

Last week, the Lebanese Army found itself in a furious battle against a militant group, Fatah al Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to General Rifi. More than 30 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting the group at a refugee camp near Tripoli.

The army called for outside support. By Friday, the first of eight planeloads of military supplies had arrived from the United States, which called Fatah al Islam “a brutal group of violent extremists.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/world/middleeast/28exodus.html?hp

This is precisely what they say is going to happen if we pull out of Iraq. I have not heard any compelling explanation of how things will get drastically worse if U.S. troops withdraw. IMHO, Congress now has blood on its hands just as the Bush Administration does.

[dave_p]

1. That was The Surge - now for The Seep

It's a rerun of Afghanistan, where the Reagan Administration thought it'd be a swell idea to back jihadis to bleed the USSR in a bogged-down counterinsurgency. There was seepage then, too, with bin Laden among the stuff that oozed out from the operation.

This time Reagan's neocon heirs turned the same strategy against America itself. And as in the 80s, jihadis with combat experience will spread from the battlefield using the channels that the CIA's earlier cultivation of international Islamist networks did so much to strengthen.