Returned Iraq fighters under close surveillance

PARIS - European security services are stepping up vigilance for Muslims who are returning home after fighting United States forces in Iraq and bringing back battle-honed combat skills and a potent Islamist message for vulnerable young men.

Agents with the French domestic intelligence service, the DST, swooped on homes in Limoges and Montpellier last month in what was called a preventive operation against Islamist radicals who had made several trips to Syria and Iraq, one of whom was killed in a suicide attack.

In Germany, around 10 people have been arrested since January on suspicion of helping terrorist networks and recruiting fighters, while in Spain, the authorities said on June 15 they had grabbed members of a suspected network with links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Islamist insurgent leader in Iraq.

Other arrests have been made in Italy and the Netherlands.

The attacks in London have also tightened the watch on mosques believed to be potential havens for radicals seeking recruits for the Iraq War or for terrorist attacks, many of them young, angry unemployed Muslims of North African descent.

"An attack like this may serve as an inspiration because there are those who are sympathetic or hailing this as a great success," said Magnus Ranstorp, head of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, a unit of St Andrews University in Scotland.

"There are hundreds of individuals who could become willing," he said.

Ranstorp said France as well as Italy, Spain, Belgian, Denmark and the Netherlands were on the frontline of countries that could get targeted after Britain.

Louis Capriolo, a former official with the DST's international terrorism branch, said that extremist networks in France "will ask themselves, 'Why blow ourselves up in Iraq? We might as well do it in Paris, Lyon, Milan or Rome'."

Gijs de Vries, the European Union's co-ordinator on counter-terrorism, said the number of returning jihadists "is a very small minority ... but it is a serious problem. The security services are fully aware of the danger that these people represent."

Previous experience has shown that Muslim battlegrounds - Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya - train the next generation of terrorists.

The European veterans of these conflicts are battle-hardened, savvy and educated in the ways of the West, using mobility, communications and Western lifestyles to move, organise and plot.

And to alienated teenage Muslims, wooed by radical preachers and switched on to the jihad by September 11, the returning "warriors" are glamorous.