TERRORISTS linked with al-Qaeda are increasingly recruiting young Iraqis to carry out suicide bombings, brainwashing them with Osama bin Laden’s sermons and drugging them before sending them off to wreak mayhem, Iraqi police believe.

The expanding networks led by foreign Islamic extremists are also using Iraq’s porous borders to smuggle drugs into Saudi Arabia, using the proceeds to finance their operations, according to police in Karbala, the city 60 miles south of Baghdad which has this month suffered a devastating wave of bombings.

A year after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq to stamp out its alleged links to terrorism, fundamentalists are freely crossing the vast Saudi border and looting weapons from arms caches left by the former regime. “It’s just God protecting the Saudi border,” Colonel Karim Sultan, Karbala’s police chief, told The Times. “The border is wide open. It’s like a business fair, you can come any time and do your shopping.”

In raids on remote border villages before the Karbala attacks, Colonel Sultan’s officers arrested a dozen men, some of them drugged and brainwashed, and impounded narcotics valued at $20 million (£11 million) and recordings of bin Laden preaching.

Colonel Sultan said that drugs being shipped to the Saudi market originated in Afghanistan and were smuggled through Iran by commercial dealers linked to al-Qaeda, then brought into Iraq with the crowds of Iranian pilgrims visiting the holy Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala.

“It’s a huge network. They have a lot of different contacts. It’s almost impossible to count. Bin Laden is starting to funnel his money in here,” he said. “They communicate by many means — satellite phones, the Internet, letters and couriers. They are very well-equipped.”

Police believe that the attacks on Karbala were carried out by nine suicide bombers. The terrorists had formerly used mainly foreign fanatics — Yemenis, Saudis, Jordanians and Syrians — for such attacks. But recent raids have netted a number of young Iraqis, some of whom were drugged and ready to act.

In a practice strikingly similar to the medieval cult of the Assassins, who used hashish to conjure up images of paradise in their suicidal attackers and trained them in remote mountain strongholds, the terrorists lure discontented young men with money and promises of glory for indoctrination.

“It’s a long process to brainwash them. They seduce them with money, then start to use drugs on them until they are half conscious,” Colonel Sultan said. The main drug used on the would-be bombers is Artane, an anti-psychotic prescription drug frequently abused by looters to give them a sense of invulnerability.

“Maybe they do all this in the villages. We hear they are doing lectures out there,” said the police chief, whose men found bin Laden recordings in the village of Ukheidir, a medieval fortress on a desert pilgrimage route to Saudi. They also unearthed a large cache of explosives and shells in a bulldozed pit outside the village.

A military official from the US-led coalition said there were up to 200 cells of Iraqi religious extremists operating in Iraq, some of them developing ties to the al-Qaeda network.

Police believe that Iraqi fundamentalists, as well as secular guerrillas loyal to the former regime, are providing the vital link for the foreigners, recruiting kamikaze bombers and locating arms stashes. “There’s an Arabic saying ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, but me, my brother and my cousin against the outsider’. You can accept odd bedfellows,” one coalition official said.

Militants loot weapons abandoned by the Iraqi army during last year’s war. These are stockpiled in in remote areas and are often laxly guarded. “In a certain sense they’re like huge supermarkets where terrorists can pull in and load up,” the official said.

Iraqi police believe unless action is taken, the carnage of this month’s Ashoura religious festival could be repeated next month when tens of thousands of pilgrims gather for the Shia festival of Arbaiyin.

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