WASHINGTON, June 22: The CIA believes the Iraq situation poses an international threat and may produce better-trained terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war, a US Counter-terrorism official said on Wednesday.

A classified report from the US spy agency says Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of deadly skills, from car bombings and assassinations to tightly coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets, the official said.

Once Iraq returns to normality, militants are likely to disperse as highly organized battle-hardened combatants capable of operating throughout the Arab-speaking world and in other regions, including Europe.

Fighters leaving Iraq would primarily pose a challenge for their countries of origin, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

But the May report, which has been widely circulated in the intelligence community, also cites a potential threat to the United States.

“You have people coming to the action with anti-US sentiment ... And since they’re Iraqi or foreign Arabs or to some degree Kurds, they have more communities they can blend into outside Iraq,” said the official.

Iraq has become a magnet for militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s, US officials say.

Osama bin Laden won prominence as a U.S. ally in the war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He later used Afghanistan as the training center for his Al Qaeda network.

President George Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in part by charging that Saddam Hussein was supporting Al Qaeda. A top U.S. inquiry later found no collaboration between pre-war Iraq and the Osama network.

But since the invasion, Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Al Zarqawi has emerged as a key guerilla figure and pledged his allegiance to Osama.

While the Afghan war against the Soviets was largely fought on a rural battlefield, the CIA report said Iraq is providing extremists with more comprehensive skills, including training in operations devised for populated urban areas.

“You have everything from bombings and assassinations to more or less conventional attacks,” the counter-terrorism official said.

“The urban warfare experience, for people facing fairly tight police and military activity at close quarters, should enable them to operate in a wider range of settings.”

CIA Director Porter Goss first described the resistance in Iraq as an emerging international threat in February during testimony before the Senate’s select committee on intelligence.

Vice President Dick Cheney has recently argued that the resistance is in its last throes, despite reports that the guerillas have grown more sophisticated and more deadly.

Mr Goss said in an interview with Time magazine that the resistance was not quite in its last throes, ‘but I think they are very close to it. And I think that every day that goes by in Iraq where they have their own government and it’s moving forward reinforces just how radical (the guerillas) are and how unwanted they are.” —Reuters