"Saddam invited Muslim scholars and preachers to Iraq for his own survival," Saad Fagih, a London-based dissident, told the Associated Press. "He convinced them that Shiites are the danger."

Wahhabism began trickling into Iraq nearly a decade ago, with radical Muslims coming from Saudi Arabia as well as other Arab countries. A Wahhabi mosque was even built in the Shiite holy city of Karbala at a time when Shiites were banned from worshipping their religion freely, the AP said.

In Oct. 2001, two Iraqi defectors told U.S. intelligence that they taught radical Islamists at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak to hijack U.S. aircraft in groups of four and five using small knives.

The hijack trainees, who were recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco and other Mideast nations, were avid students, the defectors told the London Observer - except that they stopped five times a day to pray to Allah.

U.S. intelligence agencies eventually rejected the notion of a link between Salman Pak and the 9/11 attacks, based in part on the presumption that secularist Saddam would have never conspired with religious fundamentalists.

Officials at the CIA and State Department concluded that while hijack training did take place at Salman Pak, it was actually to instruct Iraqi counterterrorism units in anti-hijacking tactics.

Editor's note: