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| Iraq |
| Baathist Experts Behind Roadside Bombs |
| 2006-04-27 |
| Baghdad, 27 April (AKI) - Behind the deadly roadside bombs in Iraq, which in three years have killed more than 800 foreign soldiers and countless Iraqis, is the hand of the M-21 of the Mukhabarat, the Baathist intelligence service, according to military experts. The knowhow for construction of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) - like the one which Thursday morning killed three Italian soldiers and one Romanian in Nasiriya - is provided by the M-21, a recent assessment in the specialist magazine Military Review reports. Within the M-21, there was a laboratory tasked with designing and creating deadly IEDs to hide inside common objects such as suitcases, belts, car seats and books. Chemists and electronics experts at the laboratory also penned manuals on how to conduct road-side attacks using IEDs. Following a series of attacks in the first months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, experts noted a growing sophistication in the preparation of IEDs, which suggested the handwork of explosive experts. According to British intelligence sources the creation of such devices is limited to a small group of explosive experts who produce IEDs on an "industrial scale". General Martin Dempsey, the commander of the fifth corps of the first US armoured division, said he considered there is a central group that provided the planning, the training and the actual improvised devices. The four deaths in the southern province of Nassiriya - in an explosion Thursday morning against a passing coalition military convoy - brings the total of registered military deaths from IEDs to 815, according to the website 'icasualties.org' which attempts to provide a head count of the number of victims since the April 2003 invasion of Iraq. From their data, IEDs emerge as the main cause of death for foreign soldiers, of whom 2,605 have lost their lives. The American contingent is the hardest hit - 778 of their 2392 dead were from roadside bombs. During the same period, the site estimates that 4556 members of the Iraqi security forces and more than 8500 civilians were also killed. Italy has some 2,500 troops based at Nasiriya in southern Iraq. A truck bomb attack against the base in November 2003 killed 19 people - most of them carabinieri and soldiers. |
| Posted by:Steve |