Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.
IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army - American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.
In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed "convoy killers". Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon's line that Iraq was not like Vietnam. The US Army is pretending that "explosively formed penetrators" are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.
Sophisticated weapons may be obtained in Iraq, if the money is there to pay for them. Until recently smugglers were moving weapons out of Iraq into Saudi Arabia - prices were higher there. A favourite method of moving them was to tie the guns under sheep, so they were concealed by the wool, and to pay the shepherds to drive them across the frontier.
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
MAKING THE WORLD A MORE TERRIFYING PLACE
Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.
An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began. The count, excluding the Arab-Israel conflict, shows in the 18 months between 11 September 2001 and the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 some 729 people were killed, while in the following 42 months to September 2006, the number of deaths rose to 5,420 - a three-fold rise in the number of deaths per year, from 486 to 1,549. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine. Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.
Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."
Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/ 7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam[Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week- raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq- the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war and unravelling of security elsewhere.
Last month John Negroponte, director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa’ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."
Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that "the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa’ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.
"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."
In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. Their research is based on the MIPT-RAND terrorism database, a trusted source.
The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed by security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5), said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.
"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."
In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.
"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan," he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.
The report said the effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts was influenced by a number of factors, such as whether a country has troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the war zone, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.
Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa’ida and its associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.
Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.
Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn
Tuesday, 20 March 2007
FOUR YEARS SINCE LIBERATION AND DRENCHED IN BLOOD
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