Washington ? The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has accelerated the spread of Osama bin Laden’s anti-Americanism among once local Islamic militant movements, increasing danger to the United States as the al-Qaida network is becoming less able to mount attacks, according to senior intelligence officials at the CIA and State Department.

At the same time, the Sunni Triangle has become a training ground for foreign Islamic jihadists who are slipping into Iraq to join former Saddam Hussein loyalists to test themselves against U.S. and coalition forces, these officials say.

Islamic militant organizations in places such as North Africa and Southeast Asia, which were previously focused on changing their local country leadership, “have been caught by bin Laden’s vision, and poisoned by it … they will now look at the U.S., Israel and the Saudis as targets,” a senior intelligence official said last week.

J. Cofer Black, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, gave the same message to a House International Relations subcommittee last Thursday, saying that bin Laden’s “virulent anti-American rhetoric … has been picked up by a number of Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe.”

The result, according to the senior intelligence analyst, is that the U.S. war on terrorism after Iraq “may transition from defeating a group to fighting a movement.” Black said the spread of bin Laden’s ideology “greatly complicates our task in stamping out al-Qaida and poses a threat in its own right for the foreseeable future.”

Since attacks in East Africa, on the USS Cole, and on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida has lost its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Its once top-down control of terrorist operations now is in the hands of less-experienced people.

That makes it less clear what roles al-Qaida played in recent bombings in Bali, Istanbul, Riyadh, Tunisia, Casablanca and Madrid. Authorities said that local extremists carried out these attacks, although Black said a possible al-Qaida leadership connection to Madrid was still under investigation.

But adding to the threat are the limited numbers of foreign Islamic fighters, some with experience in Chechnya, Kosovo and Kashmir, who are slipping over the Iraqi borders intent on joining the fight against the United States and its coalition partners. Jihadists are seeking to use Iraq as a training ground for future battles, according to Black and others.