NEW YORK, Aug 17: In much the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel, the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier, the New York Times says in a commentary.

“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 this Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq told the Times.

“If the Americans succeed here, this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for.”

Recent intelligence suggests the militants are well organized. One returning group of fighters from the militant Ansar al-Islam organization captured in the Kurdish region two weeks ago consisted of five Iraqis, a Palestinian and a Tunisia, the paper said.

Among their possessions were five forged Italian passports for a different group of militants they were apparently supposed to join, said Dana Ahmed Majid, the director of general security for the region.

The fighters steal over Iraq’s largely unpoliced borders in small groups with instructions to go to a safe house where they can whisper a password to gain admittance and then lie low awaiting further instructions, say Iraqi security officials in northern Iraq and in Baghdad.

“They come across as civilians, they shave their beards and have clean-cut hair,” said a senior security official in the Kurdish region.

Iraqi officials told the paper that they expect a broad spectrum of militants to flood Iraq. They believe that Ansar al-Islam, a small fundamentalist group believed to have links with Al Qaeda, forms the backbone of the underground network. The group was forced out of northern Iraq by a huge attack during the war.

Mullah Mustapha Kreikar, the founding spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, said in an interview on Sunday with LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, that the fight in Iraq would be the culmination of all Muslim efforts since the Islamic caliphate collapsed in the early 20th century with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. “There is no difference between this occupation and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979,” he said from Norway, where he has political asylum.

“The resistance is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the caliphate,” he said. “All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the caliphate.”

Such appeals appear to be attracting a wide range of militants. The fight against Al Qaeda and its numerous offshoots worldwide during the last two years has severely disrupted their coordination, but details emerging from either suspects captured in the last few weeks or from recent surveillance indicates that Al Qaeda training methods in everything from forgery to establishing sleeper cells are being applied here, the paper said.