Foreign fighters who have entered Iraq in recent months are making up a growing percentage of insurgents battling US troops and the country's fledgling security force, a senior US military commander said Sunday.
In an interview with CNN, General John Abizaid, the commander of US Central Command which covers Iraq, said that while most of the insurgents appear to be Iraqis, "the percentage of foreign fighters over the past several months seems to have increased."
He also said the insurgents' ranks likely include "former Baathist criminals."
"It seems to be pretty well established that they tend to cross over from Syria, although we know that there have been some infiltrations from the Saudi border, there have been some from the Iranian border," Abizaid said.
"The Syrians are not doing everything we've asked them to do," Abizaid said, adding that Syria's intelligence services are not being aggressive enough in dismantling "facilitation cells" inside Syria.
Asked for an update on the ongoing US manhunt for Iraq's most wanted insurgent, the Al-Qaeda linked Jordanian Abu Masab Al-Zarqawi, Abizaid said Al-Zarqawi's followers were certainly operating in western Iraq.
"I think ... you well understand that a big military organization like the US military are pretty good at pressuring the (insurgent) networks, and that is what we're doing.
"A single manhunt is a difficult thing. Over time, we keep finding out more and more about his organization, we take more people out of it, and his time is running out," Abizaid predicted. |