FALLUJAH, 26 January 2004 — It is the bomb beside or under the road which has turned out to be the most dangerous weapon facing the US Army in Iraq. It usually consists of heavy artillery shells detonated either by a command wire or from longer range by a remote switch such as a cell phone or a car door opener. Combat engineers from the 82nd Airborne Division based near Fallujah had not prior warning before they came to Iraq last August that they would be responsible for the lethally dangerous task of searching roads for improvised bombs. “I never heard of this type of bomb until I came to Iraq,” said Private Aaron Brown, a combat engineer in forward operational base Volturno outside Fallujah.
It is a measure of how unprepared the US army command was for the guerrilla war in central and northern Iraq, which started last summer as soon as the conventional war had finished, that the use of lethal roadside bombs caught the army by surprise. Staff Sgt. Jeremy Anderson, the leader of a squad of eight men who find and render harmless the roadside bombs, was trained to deal with conventional minefields. He found the best instruction he could get was from an old US Army manual on booby traps in Vietnam.
The bombers often show great imagination in their attacks on the main supply routes around Fallujah. “We even found one cemented into the underside of a bridge passing over the main highway so it would explode from above,” said Sgt Anderson. Some devices are aimed not at convoys but at his men. The most ingenious so far was a solar panel, which when the dirt covering it was brushed aside by a US soldier looking for a bomb, would be exposed to the light, complete an electrical circuit and detonate the explosives. Just once Anderson found the person at the other end of a 400-yard-long wire attached to a bomb. It turned out to be a 12-year-old boy who was taken back to his home where his father was arrested.
The main instrument used for detecting bombs is a foot-long silver-colored stick, which is in fact a titanium non-metallic mine probe. Anderson and his men walk along each side of a main road. “We look for wires — anything which is out of place,” he says. “We identify metal in the ground.” This is particularly difficult in Iraq because the sides of the roads are used as garbage dumps, making traditional metal detectors useless. Lying on the ground outside the cement huts at Volturno — before the war a Baath party resort beside a fresh water lake — are 122mm and 155mm shells, the main explosive device used by guerrillas. The point of the shell is removed and a blaster cap put in attached by wire to a battery, usually of the size used in a motorcycle. “It isn’t exactly rocket science,” said First Lt. Ron Sturgeon of the same unit. “Aside from shells, almost anything can be used, such as a fire extinguisher container which will fragment when it blows up.”
The advantage of the remote detonator such as a cell phone or a garage door opener from the point of view of the bomber is that he can stand further away. Anderson and his men know that somebody is watching them and their methods as they make their way slowly down the road. Noticing that they carefully turned over rocks some guerrilla attached a string to a stone and concealed the power source in an old plastic water bottle with wires leading to several heavy artillery shells. Signals from car alarms can be scrambled but cell phones are more difficult to intercept (in this case the bomber simply phones the number of a second phone attached to a battery to detonate the bomb).
None of Anderson’s squad knew what they were facing when they arrived in Fallujah. “When we first came out we were winging it,” said Specialist Shane Thomson. One of the many surprises for the US Army in Iraq is that the little titanium mine probe has turned out to be more useful than all its gigantic battle tanks.
As the attacks highlight the fragile security situation in Iraq, the United States said it envisaged a significant role for the United Nations in a planned handover of power to Iraqis. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is traveling in Europe, is expected to announce as early as today that he will send a mission to Iraq to study the feasibility of holding early elections, UN diplomats in New York said. Two experts are in Iraq to assess if it is safe for UN staff to return.
