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Spain arrest recruiters for human bomb attacks in Iraq

AP via Washington Post:

A Spanish judge has jailed eight men accused of belonging to a network that allegedly recruited people to stage suicide attacks in Iraq, officials at the National Court said Tuesday.

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The Interior Ministry said last week as it announced the arrests that the 11 men were part of a support group for a network linked to Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi's terror group, known as al-Qaida in Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq? How can that be?

The bomber production line apparently is based in Syria:

BRITAIN and other European countries are contributing to a production line of young suicide bombers who are recruited by a network of radical Islamic middlemen and sent to their deaths in Iraq.

Intelligence evidence, some of it gleaned from two would-be suicide bombers who changed their minds at the last moment and managed to escape from Iraq, has uncovered a highly professional infrastructure based in Damascus, the Syrian capital, through which most recruits pass before heading across the border.

Security sources said yesterday that there appeared to be only a trickle of recruits from Britain to Iraq. But there was enough evidence to show that there was a British link in the network of suicide planners.

The largest amount of intelligence on the suicide bomber network has been gleaned by the Americans, who have warned the Syrians on numerous occasions to clamp down on the individuals, some of them known businessmen, who are suspected of being the “facilitators”, providing all the necessary groundwork and preparation for the volunteer bombers.

Senior American officials told The Times that there was a rapid turnover of bomber recruits and that everything was done to make sure that once they had put themselves forward for a mission in Iraq they were not given enough time to change their minds.

They said there were hundreds of Arabic websites concerned with the Jihad which called for volunteer fighters. Anyone reacting to one of the websites and showing interest in carrying out missions in Iraq was contacted and given instructions. Network facilitators throughout Europe and the Arab world were in place to move the production line along.

The officials said the volunteers were flown to Damascus and taken to a safe house where their personal documents were removed and replaced with false identity papers. “They don’t spend much time in Damascus but as soon as things are ready they are escorted to the border with Iraq, and either through bribery or because of lax border arrangements, the recruits are taken into Iraq,” the officials said.

Read it all. The US should take out the facilitators if Damascus does not.