WASHINGTON: The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and many US officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops runs counter to the US military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home grown problem.

In a US visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush and his Democratic challenger have cited these fighters as a major security problem.

But according to top US military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists to Saddam Hussein's regime - who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the US military presence in Iraq - represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.

Foreign militants such as the Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But US military officials said Iraqi officials tend to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against US troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.

"They say these guys are flowing across (the border) and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."

In interviews during his US visit last week, Allawi spoke ominously of foreign militants "coming in the hundreds to Iraq". In one interview, he estimated that foreign fighters comprise 30 per cent of insurgent forces.

Allawi's comments echoed a theme in Bush's recent campaign speeches: that foreign fighters streaming into the country are proof that the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to the global war on terrorism.

Kerry has made a similar case, with a different emphasis. In remarks on the stump last week, Kerry said that the "terrorists pouring across the border" are proof that the Bush administration has turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign fighters hoping to kill Americans.

Yet, top military officers challenge all these statements. In a television interview on Sunday, Gen John P. Abizaid of the US Central Command estimated that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was below 1,000.

"While the foreign fighters in Iraq are definitely a problem that have to be dealt with, I still think that the primary problem that we're dealing with is former regime elements of the ex-Baath Party that are fighting against the government and trying to do anything possible to upend the election process," he said. Iraqi elections are set for January.

US officials admit that Iraq's porous border - especially its boundary with Syria - allows arms and money to be smuggled in with relative ease. As they describe it, however, the traffic from Syria is largely Iraqi Baathists who escaped after the US invasion and couriers bringing in money from former members of Saddam's government.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, US forces last month cracked down on traffic transiting the 375-mile Syrian border. During "Operation Phantom Linebacker", US troops picked up small numbers of foreign fighters attempting to cross into Iraq, officials say.

Yet the bulk of the traffic they detected was the kind that has existed for hundreds of years: smugglers and Syrian tribesman with close ties to sheiks on Iraq's side of the border.

Top military officers said there was little evidence that the dynamics in Iraq were similar to those in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when thousands of Arabs waged war alongside Afghans to drive the Soviet Union out of the country.

Instead, US military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq is - and always has been - Saddam loyalists who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when US troops invaded in March 2003.

During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by ordinary Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the US failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.

It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and who represent the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.