(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-16 10:06

US Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the spokesman for Multinational Forces in Iraq, said the overwhelming majority of suicide attackers are foreigners.

"Iraqis are religiously and socially opposed to suicide, requiring al-Qaida to recruit foreigners to carry out their terror. Approximately 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are carried out by foreigners," he said.

Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said al-Qaida prefers to use suicide bombers instead of other weapons because they are "easy, cheap and effective."

"Its what we call a thinking, walking bomb. He watches the whole scene, chooses the best time and best location" Alani said. "It's effective and costs nothing because you don't pay someone who is going to die."

Smith agrees that suicide bombers are the most deadly weapon in al-Qaida's arsenal.

"When you consider the indiscriminate carnage that a single suicide bomber can create against innocent civilians, the answer is unquestionably yes. In a broader sense, the foreign-born suicide bomber nearly drove Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2006 and early 2007," Smith said.

In an interview, two senior analysts who helped question the 48 captured fighters said the picture that emerges is of a cold and calculating process that recruits young alienated men who are social outcasts. Neither of the interrogators could be named for security reasons.

"Al-Qaida recruits these people from the Middle East and North Africa, hitting them at the most vulnerable time of the life," said one of the analysts with the US-led Multinational Force.

The demand for many foreign fighters begins in places such as the dingy back streets of teeming Iraqi cities such as Mosul, where al-Qaida still holds sway.

An al-Qaida cell decides it needs two suicide bombers. It puts in an order which is funded by money made through racketeering, extortion and kidnapping. That request goes to Damascus, Syria, and to the facilitators and recruiters training young men in North Africa and Saudi Arabia. Three months later, the bomber is delivered, military investigators and officials say.

According to the US military, records seized from al-Qaida show that 40 percent come from North African countries such as Libya and Algeria, and 41 percent from Saudi Arabia.

Al-Qaida in Iraq recruiters troll mosques for potential fighters — impoverished young men who are believed at odds with their family or angry at the West, the military summary says.

"They are experts at identifying these men" who are often sitting alone in mosques, one of the analysts said. "They befriend them, usually by saying that they are praying wrong and offering to correct it."

They then offer to help them with Quran studies, and that is the start of their indoctrination into the jihadi philosophy.

The summary also claims that some Arab media reports and Internet coverage of alleged USatrocities in Iraq and the Abu Ghraib scandal were a "major factor" in motivating men to fight in Iraq.

One typical example involves a 26-year-old Moroccan with a facial disfigurement that made him a pariah in his home city of Casablanca. He was recruited in a mosque and went through the training process to become a suicide attacker. In Iraq, he was locked in a room for six months. He saw that some of his friends did not return from missions.

When US forces raided the house, one of the analysts said "he decided to surrender because he didn't want to fight."

His statement and those from other captured fighters "provided valuable insight into the demographics, motivations, and recruitment of foreign fighters from the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa," according to the summary.

The social and economic situation in the region "will keep this generation, and the next generations to come, impoverished," the summary says. That will give fertile ground for al-Qaida to give such men "a purpose, a direction, and a reason to live and die."

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