Posted on 03/21/2005 3:22:52 PM PST by Bald Eagle777
Hundreds of thousands of rusty munitions leftovers from the Iran-Iraq war are scattered across the green fields and gentle hills of the two countries' common border. Long ignored, they are now being harvested by insurgents who recycle them into crude but highly deadly bombs to use against U.S. and Iraqi troops.
Saddam-era ordnance, repackaged as roadside bombs or bundled together to use in car bomb attacks, has been the leading killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Concerned about the growing trend, the military is paying Iraqis thousands of dollars for information about weapons caches....
The military has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to.. to destroy munitions throughout the country. But there are still more than enough to guarantee insurgents a steady supply for the foreseeable future.
Estimates of the number of mines before the 2003 U.S. invasion range between 8 million and 12 million. In the western half of the Diyala province, next to the border area, more than 1,400 improvised bombs have been located since November 2003, according to U.S. military statistics....
...Anti-personnel mines can be seen jutting from the sand, and mortars and rocket-propelled grenades that skipped across the desert a quarter century ago lie buried in soft beds of sand... ...
U.S. soldiers patrolling near the border recently picked up 21 pieces of rusty munitions from a villager who flagged down the same group a few hours later to say he had also collected some 200 anti-tank mines...
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Sounds exactly like the Marine I talked with today who just got back from Fallujha(sp). He said the terrorists are getting pretty desperate for anything to use to attack our troops and the Iraqi troops.
All they need is 1 nuke from Iran.
Gentlemen what does this tell us?
But I thought everything they are using against us was looted from Al-Qaqaa??? /sarcasm
Uh - they do have EOD guys with them, don't they? No? Too bad...
We have EOD and private contractors (that's why I was there) destroying all the captured Iraqi ammo they can find. Unfortunately it takes time and resources to secure, catalog, transport to a safe location, and detonate all that "boom".
The terrorists have enough people who know a little about how to make a bomb to be a Pain-in-the-A$$. Unfortunately the Army does not see fit to actually put a bunch of resources on this task. (At least they didn't at the time of my departure Ramadan '03.)
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