The spectre of terror loomed larger in Iraq Thursday following a spate of deadly attacks in and around the chaotic capital Baghdad, fueling concerns the al-Qaeda network has infiltrated the war-torn nation.
Senior US officials, both in the military and the civilian coalition struggling to rebuild Iraq, have warned that the extremist foot soldiers and financiers of Osama bin Laden are gravitating here.
Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, has said there is "clear evidence of an al-Qaeda related terrorist group, the Ansar al-Islam, reconstituting its capabilities inside of Iraq since the war."
Two months since a June US raid on what the coalition claimed was an Ansar training camp north of Baghdad, which left 70 people dead, Ansar fighters are believed to have slipped back inside Iraq from Iran, across the mountainous border.
A fugitive Jordanian national, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to be at the centre of pre-war US efforts to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, has emerged as a key suspect in the August 7 bombing of Jordan's Baghdad embassy that killed at least 14 people.
And while a previously unknown group claiming to be a branch of the terror network said it conducted a July 13 attack on US troops in the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, al-Qaeda had yet to claim attacks in the capital.
Until Wednesday, that is. It was then that gunmen who picked a firefight with US troops downtown sped from the scene after dropping calling cards from the infamous network.
"Death to the collaborators of America - Al Qaeda," the cards read.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US soldier on the ground in Iraq, said Thursday he was not aware of the calling card incident, but warned that "foreign fighters" have entered the country.
"We do know we have some fundamentalists that are coming into this country to attack coalition forces, and that will continue," Sanchez said.
Recently he said al-Qaeda was "probably" operating in Iraq.
The latest references to bin Laden's network fall in line with the White House's contention of a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, which was cited as a pretext for the launch of war.
Now, as the Americans struggle to introduce democracy in Iraq, the country, with its porous borders, weak local security force and rising suspicions of Western intervention, is seen as fertile ground for Islamic militants.
"Iraq is the nexus where many issues are coming together - Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture," Barham Saleh, the prime minister of part of a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, told the New York Times this week.
Sanchez said tracking down terror groups in Iraq such as al-Qaeda continued to be a top priority for Washington.
"We maintain a very close focus through our intel systems on identifying what terrorist groups and what foreign fighters are coming into this country," he said.
Meanwhile, a homegrown movement continues to wreak havoc on US forces with its low-intensity, guerrilla-style warfare.
"My guess is that what we're up against here are fundamentalists or former regime loyalists that are trying to recruit some of the unemployed young men that are out there, that have a need of some money, to conduct operations against the coalition," Sanchez said.
Financiers are believed to be paying off Iraqi men to conduct the attacks.
"I've seen numbers up to 10,000 dollars offered to kill Americans and coalition forces," he said.
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