The Ottawa Citizen July 06, 2007
IEDs 'evolution' of Taliban tactics
Bombs 'used and proven in Iraq' bound for Afghanistan, expert says
By Richard Foot
In Iraq today, where militants have been honing their hit-and-run bombing tactics for more than four years, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are no longer just makeshift packages of random, roadside terror.
They are the single most important weapon in the insurgents' arsenal, used in a methodical and increasingly sophisticated way to impede the entire U.S. war effort and represent what could be the deadliest threat to the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, where a powerful IED killed six Canadian soldiers on Wednesday.
Many observers of the Afghan insurgency believe the Taliban imports its IED methods from its Islamic brethren in Iraq, where bombing tactics are tested on the streets and suburbs of Baghdad. What happens with IEDs in Iraq today may foreshadow the kind of problems that await Canadian troops in Kandahar.
On May 30 in Iraq, six American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb as they rushed to rescue the crew of a U.S. helicopter shot down by Islamic insurgents. The men who attacked the chopper had placed their bomb on a road they knew the rescuers would use.
Two weeks earlier, Iraqi insurgents killed one soldier and wounded three others after luring them into a palm grove laced with homemade bombs. Moments earlier, they had attacked a U.S. patrol and fled into the palms, knowing the Americans would follow.
"Iraq is the testing ground for IEDs," says Francois Boo, a research analyst with Globalsecurity.org, a U.S.-based military information website. "What we've seen is that IED tactics are first used and proven in Iraq, and then those same tactics start appearing in Afghanistan.
"And in Iraq, there has certainly been an evolution of tactics -- how the bombs are employed, how they're made up, and how they're detonated."
IEDs have been responsible for the deaths of 27 of the 66 Canadian troops killed in Afghanistan since 2002, or 41 per cent. In Iraq, they are now responsible for about 80 per cent of all U.S. combat deaths, according to a recent Time magazine investigation.
Where once U.S. soldiers in Iraq faced the same threat now dealt with by Canadians in Afghanistan -- random roadside attacks against individual vehicles -- U.S. forces must now cope with a lethal array of IED threats, while patrolling on foot, in their vehicles or in the air.
"This country needs to focus on one thing, and that is defeating IEDs," a U.S. defence official told the Christian Science Monitor last May. "If we could figure that out, we could change the face of the war."
For at least two years in Iraq, according to a 2006 report prepared for the U.S. Congress, insurgents have planted "daisy-chain" IEDs -- a single detonator triggering a series of bombs along a roadway, in the hopes of crippling not just a single vehicle but an entire military convoy.
IEDs have also been used in complex ambush scenarios -- witnessed in May -- to kill soldiers in pursuit of fleeing insurgents, or to attack first responders rushing to the scene of an emergency.
The U.S. military has even raised fears that insurgents have experimented with shortening the fuses on mortar bombs, to be fired at helicopters, creating the first "aerial IEDs," according to a 2006 report by researchers with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Methods of remotely detonating IEDs have also evolved from simple electronic radio devices such as cellphones, to infrared "trip-wire" technology.
And in Iraq, IEDs are no longer just hidden under rocks or inside road culverts. They are stashed in refrigerators abandoned on curbsides, or camouflaged under mounds of human feces, or stuffed into animal carcasses. Sometimes they are even shoved inside live sheep, which are then herded towards military patrols.
Iraqi police have also reported IEDs hidden inside human cadavers, with the bombs being detonated when authorities come to investigate the remains.
The U.S. military has spent more than $6 billion, recruited teams of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and set up an entire Defence Department agency -- all in the hopes of solving the deadly threat of IEDs in Iraq and more recently Afghanistan.
"It's basically been a war of back and forth measures and countermeasures," says John Pike, the director of Globalsecurity.org.
"As the enemy comes up with something new, our forces find out how to mitigate it, and then the enemy simply comes up with something else."
Can the scourge of IEDs ever be beaten?
"Not until we kill all the enemy," says Pike, "or they decide to stop building them."
To see a Global video report on the latest from afghanistan go to ottawacitizen.com
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