Much of the US effort in Iraq in recent months has been aimed at stopping the inflow of foreign jihadis. US warplanes have blown up bridges to deny insurgent infiltration routes, troops have occupied small towns thought to be crossing points for foreigners into bigger cities, and spy drones continuously buzz the Syrian border.

Even if the US can seal Iraq's borders, stopping the flow of foreign fighters would do little to eliminate most of the country's insurgents. Only 4 to 10 percent of the country's combatants are foreign fighters, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies released last week. But while they are a minority, says the report, they are a potent segment largely from Algeria and Syria.

"The fact that there are 3,000 foreign fighters in Iraq is cause for alarm, particularly because they play so large a role in the most violent bombings and in the efforts to provoke a major and intense civil war,'' write coauthors Anthony Cordesman, a former director of defense intelligence assessment for the secretary of Defense, and Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi national and security analyst. Based mostly on Saudi intelligence, they estimate that active members of the insurgency number about 30,000.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the report says, Iraq has become one of the global centers for the recruiting and training of what Mr. Cordesman and Mr. Obaid term "neo-Salafi" terrorists. These are essentially Islamist fighters that share Al Qaeda's extreme rejection of non-Muslim "infidels" and seek to create Islamic states patterned after the Arabian peninsula of the 7th and 8th centuries.

Also, the large numbers of foreign fighters who may survive the conflict are likely to return to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria carrying terrorism skills and highly radicalized world views with them, they write.

"They are also a threat because they give bin Laden and other neo-Salafi extremist movements publicity and credibility among the angry and alienated in the Islamic world, and because many are likely to survive and be the source of violence,'' in other countries.

Most of Iraq's fighters, they say, are Sunni Arab "nationalists" who distrust Shiites now in power. Foreign fighters, the report claims, are seeking to manipulate this distrust into a wider civil war.

The authors also point out that the "fly paper" theory about the Iraq war - that a limited global number of Islamic militants would be lured to Iraq and destroyed - is probably incorrect. Instead, they estimate that many of the foreigners fighting in Iraq were peaceful before the US invasion.

In particular, the authors find that the presence of Saudi militants in Iraq has been overstated - estimating they make up 1 to 2 percent of fighters there - but say that most of the young Saudis fighting in Iraq were not violent before the war.

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