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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Iraq IEDs based on Hezbollah originals |
| 2005-08-04 |
| An hour before dark on July 23, a huge bomb buried on a road southwest of Baghdad Airport detonated underneath a Humvee carrying four American soldiers. The explosive device was constructed from a bomb weighing 230 kilograms, or 500 pounds, or more that was meant to be dropped from an aircraft, according to military explosives experts, and was probably Russian in origin. The blast left a crater 2 meters deep and 5 meters wide, or 6 feet deep and nearly 17 feet wide. All that remained of the armored vehicle afterward was the twisted wreckage of the front end, a photograph taken by American officers at the scene showed. The four soldiers were killed. In recent months, as was shown in the catastrophic bombing in Haditha on Wednesday, in which 14 marines were killed, the roadside bombs favored by insurgents in Iraq have grown significantly in size and sophistication, adding to their deadliness. But what happened in the aftermath of the attack further alarmed U.S. military officers. A special squad of explosive experts, formed to investigate major insurgent bomb attacks, was sent immediately to the site to begin looking for evidence about who was responsible, several American officers said. Examining the area in the dark, a British explosives expert stepped on a second smaller bomb buried nearby and was badly wounded, two American officers said. He would later have an arm and a leg amputated, the officers said. A third device, hidden a few yards away, was found and defused. "This was a catastrophic event," said Sergeant Jason Knapp, a U.S. Air Force bomb technician who arrived at the scene of the attacks the next morning. Military personnel said the attack last month indicated that a new and deadly bomb-making cell targeting American patrols was probably operating near the large coalition military base at the airport, an area that two officers said had seen little insurgent activity in months. There was further evidence for that on Saturday. Less than a mile from the July 23 attack, four more American soldiers were killed when their Humvee was struck by another hidden bomb. They were from the same Georgia National Guard battalion as the four soldiers killed in the previous attack. The episode illustrates the constantly evolving war of moves and counter-moves happening every day in Iraq between insurgent bombers and soldiers trying to stop the roadside bombs and suicide attacks. As the threat from bombs and suicide attacks has grown, the Pentagon has rushed 24,000 armored Humvees to Iraq since late 2003. But the insurgents have responded by building bombs powerful enough to penetrate the vehicles' steep plating. As the military has begun conducting post-bombing investigations, insurgents increasingly have begun planting multiple devices at the same location, apparently to disrupt investigative teams sent to the blast site, or at least delay their work while they clear the site of any secondary bombs. The British officer who was wounded investigating the site, whose name has not been released, was a member of the Combined Exploitation Cell, an American-led organization that is charged with identifying the insurgent bomb-makers using clues recovered at bomb sites. The organization is composed of specialists from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and from Britain and Australia. Senior American commanders say they have also seen evidence that insurgents are making increased of use of "shaped" charges that concentrate the blast and give it a better chance of penetrating armored vehicles, causing higher casualties. Bomb-making techniques used by the anti-Israeli militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon increasingly have begun appearing in roadside bombs in Iraq. A senior American commander said that bombs employing shaped charges closely match Hezbollah's homemade bombs used against Israel. "Our assessment is that they are probably going off to school," to learn how to make bombs that can destroy armored vehicles, the officer said. Sometimes improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs, are placed in the open to draw in American disposal units. "A lot of times they plant fake IEDs and wait until you come on site to open up," said Sergeant Burnell Zachary. "Once the mortar rounds stop, the drive-bys come." Last week, as an American bomb team was defusing a bomb in the predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighborhood of Ameriyeh, a passing black BMW opened fire on the unit and its security detail, according to an after-action report. An Iraqi police detachment that was providing security for the team returned fire and struck the passenger in the car in the chest, the report said. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, American snipers were watching an Iraqi man who was stacking rocks along a street the bomb disposal unit would have to take leaving the neighborhood, according to the report. They suspected he was building a hiding place for a bomb. "Snipers engaged and killed the individual who appeared to be emplacing an IED," the report says. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 Seems to me that these tactics call for spies enlisted from among the friendly local population, or the bringing in of recruits from other parts of the country. Vehicles aren't going to keep on growing in size and armorplate in response to ever bigger roadside bombs, so the logical action is to go after and kill the bomb-makers in the first place. There's no way they're planting those big bombs in complete secrecy; someone is seeing them doing their work. As for Hezbollah, a Tomahawk detonated right in Nasrallah's living room would probably make a pretty clear statement. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-08-04 18:30 |