New Iraq Agency to Hunt Rebels

Friday, January 30, 2004

By Edward Wong

New York Times Writer

There are varying estimates of the number of foreign fighters in Iraq. Mr. Janabi, the senior official at the Iraqi National Accord, said he believed that there were up to 5,000 such fighters in the country, with less than a fifth of those carrying out the operations and the rest involved in financing, recruiting and other logistical activities. Many were coming across the Syrian and Saudi borders, he said, and some from Iran.

Baghdad, Iraq -- NYT
The Iraqi authorities, with the help of American intelligence agencies, are creating an intelligence service here that will focus on rooting out guerrilla fighters, especially those from outside the country, Iraqi and American officials said Friday. The service will employ some former agents of Saddam Hussein's security apparatus and will probably receive financing from the American government, the officials said.

Many of the agents will work in the border towns of Iraq to identify foreign fighters who have slipped into the country and will monitor their activities, said Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior member of the Iraqi Governing Council's security committee. The service will employ 500 to 2,000 people, he said, and is expected to be formed well before the Bush administration transfers sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.

The Central Intelligence Agency is taking the lead in helping put together the new service, American officials said. The C.I.A. has close ties to the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group founded by former Baath Party members who worked from London and Jordan to try to overthrow Mr. Hussein's government.

The head of the group, Iyad Alawi, heads the Governing Council's security committee and met in December with the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to discuss the new intelligence service, officials said. Mr. Janabi, also a senior official in the group, is a leading candidate to head the new service.

The formation of an intelligence service is a very delicate matter here because of the deadly history of Mr. Hussein's secret police force, the Mukhabarat, the main instrument of domestic repression. The agency dissolved after the ouster of Mr. Hussein in April, and many senior officials fled to neighboring countries.

"Under the Saddam regime, the entire structure of Iraq was built on security," Mr. Janabi said as he sat in his office in a building once used to train Baath Party officials. "The mentality of the people revolved around this security."

The new service's projected focus on foreign fighters could help allay public fears of a return to those days.

Mr. Janabi said fewer than 5 percent of the workers in the new agency would be recruited from the ranks of the Mukhabarat and other security forces that operated under Mr. Hussein. They will be vetted to weed out those guilty of human rights crimes, he added. He insisted that their connections, knowledge and experience could prove invaluable.

(More: NYTimes.com)

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Dan