THE invasion of Iraq “substantially” increased the terror threat to Britain and turned British Muslims against their own country, says the former head of the MI5 spy agency.
Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, controller of the domestic intelligence agency between 2002 and 2007, said yesterday that her agency “didn’t anticipate the degree to which British citizens would become involved” in al-Qa’ida-linked terror plots and that the Iraq war provided a “highly significant” source of motivation for British-born terrorists.
Giving evidence at the Chilcott inquiry, she said MI5 was “pretty well swamped” with intelligence suggesting a radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain after the 2003 invasion.
“The focus was not foreigners, the rising and increasing threat was a threat from British citizens and that was a very different scenario to, as it were, stopping people coming (into Britain). It was what has now become called homegrown,” she said.
Asked whether the Iraq war increased the overall terrorist threat in Britain, Lady Manningham-Buller replied: “Substantially.”
Her testimony sits uncomfortably alongside the claims of successive British governments that the deployment of British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan was necessary to prevent al-Qa’ida-linked terrorist attacks in Britain.
The former intelligence chief said that despite a doubling of its budget in 2003, the agency was, after 2004 “overburdened” countering plans for terror attacks on British soil. In 2005, MI5 wished to do “five times” what it was able to manage with its resources.
She said British involvement in Iraq “radicalised” some British citizens, “not a whole generation, a few among a generation — who saw our involvement in Iraq on top of our involvement in Afghanistan as an attack on Islam”.
Asked what specific proof there was of a direct correlation between the Iraq invasion and the growth in Muslim terror plots in Britain she said: “I think we can produce evidence because of the numerical evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified and the correlation of that to Iraq and the statements of people as to why they were involved.
“What Iraq did was to produce a fresh impetus of people prepared to engage in terrorism.”
She said that on the evidence of video “martyrs’ wills” by would-be British terrorists, the invasion gave credibility to a “single narrative” propagated by al-Qa’ida that “everything the West was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and so Islam. Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way he wasn’t able to before.”
About 70-80 young British Muslims had directly participated, going to Iraq, she said, “not to fight for Her Majesty’s Forces but against them”.
Asked about the intelligence picture ahead of the invasion, Lady Manningham-Buller said MI5 did not believe there was a terrorist threat to Britain from Iraq or a threat of Saddam Hussein supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.
MI5 considered there was no “credible evidence” to link Saddam’s regime to the attacks on 9/11, she said. “It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine, which is why Donald Rumsfeld started an intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.”
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