Jihad in Iraq? The devastating Al Qaeda-style suicide bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad has given new heft to declarations by US officials that there is mounting evidence of Islamist fighters crossing Iraq's borders.

It's also spurring analysts to ask if Iraq is becoming the new Afghanistan - a magnet for Islamic extremists bent on waging jihad against the United States in the heart of the Arab world.

"Iraq is developing as Al Qaeda's new battlefield," says Rohan Gunaratna, an author and terrorism expert. "Without a theater of jihad, they cannot produce terrorists for operations anywhere else. They lost Afghanistan, so they needed a new combat theater in which to train and inspire. And the US invasion gave it to them."

Thousands of Muslim volunteers flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight Soviet occupation forces which had invaded the country in 1979.

The cumbersome Soviet military was unable to subdue the lightly armed, resourceful Afghan and Arab mujahideen (holy fighters) and withdrew from the country in 1988.

Now analysts say that calls for young men to fight in Iraq are popping up on jihad websites across the world.

If Gunaratna is right, the US is in for a long and bloody occupation. In the thinking of Al Qaeda, the mere sustaining of a presence, and the ability to carry out intermittent attacks, is a form of victory, a sign that the world's great superpower is incapable of stamping them out.

"We recommend luring the enemy forces into a protracted, close, and exhausting fight," Osama bin Laden threatened in a taped statement to "his Iraqi brothers" in February. "The enemy fears city and street wars most."

Bin Laden loathed the secular Saddam Hussein, who repressed Islamic movements in his country as much as he did his political opponents.

But in the wake of the US invasion, he urged his followers to make common cause with the socialist Baath regime.

"Under these circumstances, there will be no harm if the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity of socialists," he said.

But despite the potential common cause among Hussein's Baathists and Al Qaeda fighters, not all analysts believe that the Afghanization of Iraq has already begun.

US officials have said nothing conclusive about the source of specific attacks yet, but they are convinced that militant Islamist groups, both Shiite and Sunni, are well established in Iraq and that foreign fighters are pouring into the country.

"The borders are quite porous, as you'd imagine, and the fact that we've captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in an interview Friday with the Al Jazeera Arabic satellite channel.

The number of volunteers crossing into Iraq remains unclear. However, the Saudi security authorities reportedly have expressed unease at the "disappearance" of some 3,000 young men, suspecting that they have crossed the border into Iraq to wage jihad against the coalition forces.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, has written of the need to shift Al Qaeda's confrontation with the US from relatively peripheral places like Afghanistan to the Middle East.

"We must seek to move the battlefront to the heart of the Islamic world, which represents the true arena of the battle and the theater of the major battles in defense of Islam," he writes.

Al Qaeda's immediate goals have been the overthrow of corrupt or secular regimes in the Middle East - starting with Saudi Arabia, the land of the prophet. An Al Qaeda beachhead near Saudi Arabia could directly threaten the monarchy - in addition to threatening US forces.

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