Foreign al Qaeda militants waging a campaign of suicide car bombings in Iraq plan to send some fighters home in preparation for similar operations in their own countries, the Iraqi interior minister said on Sunday. Interior Minister Bayan Jabor said documents found with Abu Azzam, said to be a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, signaled a plan to send foreign Arab Sunni militants back home to widen the battlefield beyond Iraq. "We got hold of a very important letter from Abu Azzam to Zarqawi asking him to begin to move a number of Arab fighters to the countries they came from to transfer their experience in car bombings in Iraq," Jabor told Reuters in an interview in Amman. "So you will see insurgencies in other countries," said Jabor, a member of the Shi'ite Islamist SCIRI party, a key component of the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led coalition government.
U.S. and Iraqi forces tracked Abu Azzam, an Iraqi, and killed him last week dealing what a U.S. commander called a serious blow to the group responsible for some of the biggest suicide attacks over the past two years. Hundreds of Islamist fighters had already left Iraq in recent months, Jabor said, though security forces were also braced for a spike in car bomb attacks ahead of October 15's referendum on a post-Saddam Hussein constitution.