The New York Times is reporting that the Central Intelligence Agency is warning that Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat. Officials who have read the new assessment said it made clear that the U.S. war in Iraq was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries fighters more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict. According to the Times, the CIA report spells out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.