The Wire

As western nations ponder whether the terrorist threat they face is primarily home-grown or imported, Iraq is also dealing with the devastating consequences of foreign terrorism. Over the weekend 110 Iraqis have been killed and 300 wounded in twenty suicide bombings around the country. MPs in the Iraqi parliament have warned that these attacks push Iraq to the brink of civil war. Now research conducted separately by The Saudi Arabian government and researchers at Israel’s Global Research in International Affairs Centre has concluded that suicide bombers and other insurgents have been primarily motivated by the war in Iraq itself. This contradicts claims by the US administration that long-term terrorists have been using Iraq as an opportunity to attack the US. The Saudis investigated the backgrounds of 300 of its nationals caught trying to illegally enter Iraq, as well as the backgrounds of more than thirty suicide bombers, both of whom had been influenced by the teachings of radical clerics. Meanwhile, the Israeli study scrutinized the cases of 154 non-Iraqi fighters and found that very few of this number had any previous association with terrorism. Dr Andrew Vincent, director of the Centre for Middle East and North African Studies at Macquarie University spoke to Sarah Greenlees about the ramifications of the Saudi and Israeli studies.