The war has allowed Osama bin Laden's terror network to "gain a foothold in Iraq where it was totally absent before March 2003", said Jean-Pierre Filiu, an analyst at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.

Al-Qaeda has "managed to spread the campaign of terror in the Arab world by using Iraq as a platform", Filiu told AFP.

The invasion also helped "revive the international recruitment of militants under the slogan of 'holy jihad in Iraq'", said Filiu.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq -- the local affiliate of bin Laden's group -- once described the US-led invasion of Iraq as "divine intervention".

Zarqawi, who unleased a wave of attacks on US and Iraqi forces as well as Iraqi civilians, was killed in a US air strike in June 2006.

"America wanted to create in Iraq a battlefield against terror. It managed to do it, but not in a way it wanted," read a 2006 report by Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research.

The war "has given an enormous boost to terrorism rather than diminish it," pointed another study by the political sciences department at the University of Gand in Belgium.

Although the figure for Iraq casualties is always controversial, a February report by London-based Opinion Research Business said nearly one million people have been killed since the war began -- and most of the victims are civilians slaughtered in bombings set off by Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The deadliest attack in Iraq -- and the worst in the world since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States -- came on 14 August, 2007, when two truck bombs detonated in a far northern community of the religious Yezidi community, killing 400 people.

Peter Galbrith, author of "The End of Iraq," wrote about an attack seen as the opening shot in Iraq's sectarian bloodletting.

"Iraq's deadliest terrorist attack killed no one," Galbraith said, referring to the bombing of a golden-domed Shiite shrine in the Sunni town of Samarra on February 22, 2006, by alleged Al-Qaeda extremists.

The destruction of the dome of one of the world's holiest Shiite shrines, the 1,000-year-old Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum, triggered Iraq's Shiite-Sunni sectarian bloodletting that has killed tens of thousands of people.

"Americans created a new front of jihad" which helped raise funds "and mobilise fighters, especially in the neighbouring countries and Saudi Arabia," said Dominique Thomas, a researcher at Paris-based Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

This front, in the heart of the Middle East, has resulted in "an influx of foreign fighters" entering Iraq.

US blunders such as the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the massacre of some 20 civilians in the town of Haditha at the hands of US marines have undermined US credibility in the region.

"The images that emerged in the media during these five years have created a hostile environment for the United States in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world," Thomas said.

"These images have contributed greatly to mobilise and generate callings .... American occupation has only strengthened radical Islamism."

Bush has never publicly admitted that his strategies in Iraq against terrorism were failing and in recent months has insisted that "progress" is being made in its battle against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But the US administration in a 2005 report accepted that "terrorist groups" were turning Iraq into "a safe haven from which to plot and plan new attacks against the United States and its allies".

A similar US State Department report in 2007 said Iraq has been used by "terrorists as a rallying cry for radicalisation and extremist activity that has contributed to instability in neighbouring countries".

On the eve of the anniversary, a detailed Pentagon study confirmed there was no direct link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, debunking a key claim that Bush's administration used to topple the dictator.

The study of 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of former Saddam colleagues "found no smoking gun between Saddam's Iraq and Al-Qaeda," said the study, quoted in US media on Thursday.

"State terrorism became a routine tool of State power" but "the predominant target of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens," it said.

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