President Bush and his aides routinely call Iraq the "central front" in
Bush's war on terrorism and likely will say that the preponderance of
attacks there and in Afghanistan prove their point. But critics say the
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have worsened the terrorist threat.
Washington - A State Department report on terrorism due out next
week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks
worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the boost due to
growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.

The annual report's release comes amid a bitter feud between the
White House and Congress over funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and a
deadline favored by Democrats to begin a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides earlier this
week had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year's
edition of the terrorism report, officials in several agencies and on
Capitol Hill said.

Ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or near the
congressionally mandated deadline of Monday, the officials said.

"We're proceeding in normal fashion with the final review of this
and expect it to be released early next week," State Department deputy
spokesman Tom Casey said.

A half-dozen U.S. officials with knowledge of the report's contents
or the debate surrounding it agreed to discuss those topics on the
condition they not be identified because of the extreme political
sensitivities surrounding the war and the report.

Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community's National
Counterterrorism Center, the report says there were 14,338 terrorist
attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.

Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.

Worldwide, there were about 5,800 terrorist attacks that resulted in
at least one fatality, also up from 2005. The figures for Iraq and
elsewhere are limited to attacks on noncombatants and don't include
strikes against U.S. troops.

Even after this year's report was largely completed and approved,
Rice and her aides this week called for a further round of review, in
part to avoid repeating embarrassing missteps of recent years in the
report's release, officials said. The review process is being led by
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, formerly the nation's
intelligence czar.

The U.S. intelligence community is said to be preparing a separate,
classified report on terrorist "safe havens" worldwide, and officials
have debated whether Iraq meets that definition.

The report can be expected to be used as ammunition for both sides
in the domestic battle over the Iraq war.

President Bush and his aides routinely call Iraq the "central front"
in Bush's war on terrorism and likely will say that the preponderance of
attacks there and in Afghanistan prove their point.

But critics say the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have
worsened the terrorist threat.

The contention by Bush and Vice President **** Cheney that al-Qaida
terrorists were in Iraq and allied with the late Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein before the invasion has been disproved on numerous fronts.

In September, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found that
Saddam rejected pleas for assistance from al-Qaida leader Osama bin
Laden and tried to capture another terrorist whose presence in Iraq is
often cited by Cheney, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of
al- Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime,
refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational
support," the Senate report said.

Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked in
counterterrorism at the State Department, said that while the new report
would show major increases in attacks last year in Iraq and Afghanistan,
it could chart reductions in mass casualty attacks in the rest of the
world.

"The good news is ... we're seeing verifiable and drastic
reductions," he said.

Among the major strikes were bombings in the Egyptian Red Sea resort
of Dahab on April 24, which killed 23 people and injured more than 60,
and aboard trains in Mumbai, India, that left more than 200 dead and in
excess of 700 wounded on July 11.

In 2004, the State Department was forced to correct a first version
of the report that the administration had used to tout progress in
Bush's war on terror. The original version had undercounted the number
of people killed in terrorist attacks in 2003, putting it at less than
half of the actual number.

In 2005, the department was again accused of playing politics with
the report when it decided not to publish the document after U.S.
officials concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than
in any year since 1985.

The outcry forced Rice to drop that plan and publish the report