Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle US troops, according to a document found with the former Iraqi leader when he was captured, administration officials said on Tuesday. The document appears to be a directive, written after he lost power, from Saddam to leaders of the Iraqi resistance, counselling caution against getting too close to Islamic jehadists and other foreign Arabs coming into occupied Iraq, according to US officials. The document provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration’s contention of close cooperation between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda terrorists. CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam. Officials said that Saddam apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the Baathists, who were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he wanted his supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jehadists, officials familiar with the document said. A new, classified intelligence report circulating within the US government describes the document and its contents, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified. The officials said that they had no evidence that the document found with Saddam was a fabrication. The role of foreign Arab fighters in the Iraqi resistance to the US-led occupation has been a source of debate within the US government ever since the fall of Baghdad in April. Initially, US analysts feared that thousands of fighters would flood into Iraq, seeking an Islamic jehad in much the same way an earlier generation of Arabs travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet occupation. Yet military and intelligence officials now believe that the number of foreign fighters who have entered Iraq is relatively small, and US military units posted along the border to screen against such an influx have reported that they have seen few signs of foreign fighters trying to cross the border. —(NYT)
