THE invasion of Iraq will backfire spectacularly, igniting Islamic fanaticism and creating “100 new bin Ladens”, President Mubarak of Egypt told the United States yesterday.

Mr Mubarak, accused by many of his countrymen of being a White House stooge for maintaining Egypt’s increasingly unpopular peace treaty with Israel, voiced the fear of moderate Arab states that America was playing into al-Qaeda’s hands by waging war.

“When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mr Mubarak told Egyptian soldiers in Suez.

“Instead of having one bin Laden, we will have 100 bin Ladens.”

His warning followed the suicide bombing in Iraq at the weekend in which four American soldiers were killed, and the claim by Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian extremist group, that it has sent 4,000 volunteers for suicide missions to Baghdad. The linking of Iraq with the Palestinian conflict was made explicit when Islamic Jihad leaders dedicated a suicide-bomb attack at the Israeli coastal resort of Netanya on Sunday as “a gift to the heroic Iraqi people”.

Nafez Azzam, the group’s leader in the West Bank and Gaza, said yesterday that it would intensify attacks “to make it clear to Arabs, Muslims and the whole world that what is going on here in Palestine is the same as what is happening in Iraq”.

Tony Blair has consistently urged the White House to publish its road map to a Palestinian state to offset universal Arab perceptions that it is concerned only with American and Israeli interests in the region.

Militants in the West Bank town of Tulkarem announced that the Netanya suicide bomber belonged to the Ali al-Noamani brigade, newly formed in honour of the Iraqi taxi driver who blew up the four American soldiers a day earlier.

Tulkarem also produced Abdul Bassit Odeh, the suicide bomber who killed 29 Israelis at a Passover dinner in Netanya 12 months ago, and yesterday his father, Kassam, welcomed Iraq’s adoption of his son’s deadly tactic.

“The Iraqis are people who are defending their homeland from people who are coming to occupy them,” he said. “My son’s motives may have been Islamic or nationalistic, but it leads to the same goal, which is to get rid of an occupier. We want Saddam to liberate his land from the invader.”

A picture of Saddam as the only Arab leader willing to defy an arrogant superpower is exactly what the Iraqi leader has exploited in recent days, according to analysts of his propaganda strategy. Adnan Abu-Odeh, a political adviser to the late King Hussein of Jordan, said that images of captured American soldiers and shot-down aircraft generated widespread admiration in the region. “I think it has brought back self-confidence to the Arab masses,” he said. “These images have restored a confidence that has been lost during the intifada.”

• Cairo: Some Arab states are considering the creation of a new regional group adapted to the circumstances created by the Iraq war, Arab diplomats said yesterday. It would exclude some of the present 22 members of the Arab League, they said, and would be a sub-group of the Cairo-based pan-Arab organisation, rather than a replacement. (AFP)

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