60% of Foreign Insurgency from Allies Saudi Arabia & Libya

This information was discovered from the data recovered from computers and documents seized in a September raid on a camp in Sinjar, Iraq.

While the data confirms that the majority of the insurgents are homegrown Iraqis and principly Sunni, a large percentage of the foreign fighters are from US allies, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Nothing like your friends stabbing you in the back, we shall see if the US puts more pressure on these allies to clamp down on these numbers, but somehow I think little will be done since the government seems to turn a blind eye to anything that might be traced to the Saudi's.

The article does not mention insurgents from Syria or Iran. The article also credits senior military officials as the source of this information so a possibility of bias exists since the article originally appeared in the New York Times who is no stranger to politically biased articles and using unnamed sources.

Ha! I went from being upset and angry to now being sceptical of the information provided in the story, it is pretty bad when we have to question motives behind stories from what once were the most reliable sources of news in the country...

I am sure some of the info has to be accurate but what information was conveniently ommitted, where's the rest of the information?

Who knows? I will let you make your own decision as to the authenticity of this information.

Iraq insurgents traced back to American allies
SAUDI Arabia and Libya, both considered US allies in the fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60% of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to become suicide bombers or take part in other attacks, senior American military officials say.

Well the information tallies with what US military leaders have been saying for a long time, that around 45% of foreign insurgents are Saudis. It's interesting though to see the total numbers are so low compared to Iraqi nationals in the insurgency.

The British found that insurgent attacks dropped by 90% when they pulled out of Basra, so it supports the idea that the majority of the insurgents are just normal Iraqi's fighting against occupation and the violence would drop if we just left them alone.

In the spirit of denying ignorance, I searched for the times piece.

I found the original article from the NYTimes, it is more indepth, the original link I posted, used only a portion of the article so to be fair to the NYTimes I will provide the link here for the complete article.

My apologies for not doing this in the first place

www.nytimes.com


That's what happens when I start posting before having my morning coffee

[walks off to get a DOUBLE STRENGTH cup]




ed:sp

[edit on 11/22/2007 by JacKatMtn]

This doesn't surprise me one bit, after all most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. Not to mention compared to other middle-eastern nations, they're the most intolerant of them all with their Wahabbi brand of Islam.