Iraq War Increased Terrorist Threat to the UK, Former MI5 Chief Tells Chilcot Inquiry, By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

The war in Iraq led to a huge increase in the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 has told the Iraq Inquiry.

Baroness Manningham-Buller added that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein had caused a "long-term major and strategic problem" for Britain by allowing al-Qaeda time to build a stronghold in Afghanistan unnopposed.

She told the inquiry: "Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam…

“Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”

The inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, released a memo written by Baroness Manningham-Buller in March 2002, in which she warned the Government that declaring war on Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.

The note made clear that MI5 did not regard Iraq as a significant terrorist threat to British interests before the war, and had discounted any link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks on the US.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, then deputy director-general of the Security Service, also revealed that MI5 refused to provide evidence for the Government's now-infamous dossier on Saddam's military capability because it doubted the credibility of the information.

"We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn't think it was reliable," she said.

She said the intelligence on Iraqi WMD – most of which came from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 – used to justify the invasion had been "fragmentary" and did not justify the weight placed upon it.

"If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that and I think there is very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision," she said.

She said the decision to go to war in Iraq meant that insufficient attention was paid to Afghanistan.

"By focusing on Iraq we reduced the focus on the al Qaida threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major and strategic problem," she said.