Posted on 04/09/2010 10:46:22 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
AUSTIN - The Mexican military seized improvised explosive devices just miles from the Valley. The IEDs (or roadside bombs) are the same weapons terrorists use in the Middle East.
The homemade explosives can be sophisticated or crude. They're often deadly. They've killed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CHANNEL 5 NEWS learned the weapons are also in the hands of the drug cartels in Mexico.
On March 30, more than 50 cartel members attacked the Mexican military in Matamoros and Reynosa. Eighteen people died.
Soldiers seized 50 rifles, 60 hand grenades, and eight IEDs.
"The seizure of the IEDs is definitely worrisome," says a Latin American tactical analyst for STRATFOR, a private intelligence agency.
CHANNEL 5 NEWS traveled to Austin to meet with the analyst. We concealed his identity for security reasons.
"The construction of the devices that we've seen are similar to crude devices that are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq," he tells us.
He says the IEDs used in Matamoros and Reynosa were mining grade explosives.
"As you're experimenting with the craft of bomb making, there's going to be a learning curve to it," explains the analyst.
That means cartel bomb makers are getting more advanced.
The STRATFOR analyst says, "We've never seen them actually construct a device up until recently."
The Mexican military disabled an IED in Oaxaca, Mexico in February. Another IED blew up in Nuevo Leon last month.
"The blast is going to have a much larger effect than a single rifle round," the analyst tells us.
We're told the danger is real.
"Once again, the risk of collateral damage - being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time," explains the STRATFOR analyst.
STRATFOR says the cartels are making more IEDs everyday. Right now, experts don't think they'll try to use them here in the U.S. But they're not ruling anything out.
People who have live and work in Mexico say the IEDs are just one more thing to worry about. They tell us it already feels like they're living in a war zone.
They say they never know if they'll encounter a shootout or even a roadside bomb.
The people we spoke to add they're worried about the future and what will be left behind for their children, after the cartel war.
Hopefully they are using IUDs, too.
Don’t want them reproducing.
IEDs, beheadings, murdering innocents.
They stole the Islamist playbook.
How long before they start using them on this side of the border? haven’t they already threatened law enforcement?
As agents clear out Mexican gangs, more brutal ones move in
Washington Times ^ | April 7, 2010 | Jerry Seper
The bodies that turned up on a squalid back street in the border town of Reynosa in December were no longer human. The torsos showed deep lacerations and punctures; the severed heads were badly beaten and mutilated. Crudely butchered limbs lay scattered across the tarmac stained by blood.
“See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive,” read a note written - like so many others - in block letters on a splattered poster board.
Beheadings and dismemberments have since become the cartels’ signature crime - to punish those who oppose or betray them, to establish their turf, to terrorize the citizenry against testifying against them, and to press community and political leaders to collaborate.
Heads, torsos and severed legs and arms have been strewn along city streets throughout Mexico, mostly in border towns where the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels are in a pitched battle against each other and with Los Zetas.
....dozens of people have been decapitated in recent months. Sometimes, the heads are lined up neatly in rows, displayed along with banners designed to intimidate enemies, rivals and police.
Beheading was a lesson the drug smugglers learned after watching Iraqi insurgents carry out videotaped beheadings, Mexican Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said during a 2007 news conference after the discovery of one of the first severed heads.
Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr., who has experienced the border violence firsthand, said his department started seeing beheadings in Mexico about a year after the videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan.
....the cartels have increased their efforts to recruit gang members along the southwestern border, including U.S. citizens who are a particularly valuable asset ....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2489809/posts
Oh, they must be getting those from Texas too. thanks to our second amendment and all.
Yes, they’ve threatened American law enforcement officers. And yes, Napolitano won’t know what to do about these.
Of course they are - Islamists from the ME are helping them!
Somalis with terrorist links feared headed to U.S. border
[snip]”Somalis with ties to a terrorist organization are believed to be plotting to illegally enter the United States after being mistakenly released from custody in Mexico, a confidential federal law enforcement report said.” SNIPPET: “Included in the group is Mohamed Osman Noor, 35, of Somalia, who U.S. officials suspect has strong ties to Al-Shabaab Mujahideen, an Islamist insurgency group in the ongoing war in Somalia with ties to al Qaeda. The report was written by an intelligence official with the Laredo Sector Border Intelligence Center, a joint federal task force under the Department of Homeland Security that operates on...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2487850/posts
Is it a coincidence Afghanistan is one of the largest exporters of opium? Drugs, weapons, expertise. It’s your one stop shopping.
We are kidding ourselves if we don’t think that Hezbollah and Hamas are in Mexico. Plenty of mosques have been built in Chiapas in recent years. Juarez is nothing but Gaza-on-the-Rio. Expect the first nuke attack on American soil to be detonated there.
“Oh, they must be getting those from Texas too. thanks to our second amendment and all.”
Yep. Aisle 6 at WalMart.
well, I guess have to ban the sale of hand grenades and IEDs in America now. We have to do it for the children.
US fears Hamas, Hizballah setting up shop in Mexico
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1921215/posts
November 05, 2007
Washington believes the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist militia Hizballah are looking to set up operations in Mexico with the aim of eventually infiltrating the United States, according to a former CIA counter-terrorism official.
Robert Grenier, who until recently was head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, told a press conference in Mexico last Thursday that the Muslim terrorist organizations see the illegal immigration and drug trafficking networks in the Latin American nation as the most effective way to move people and equipment into the US.
Grenier said that the Bush Administration fears both Hamas and Hizballah may already have sleeper cells operating in Mexico.
Hamas and Hizballah have both threatened in the past to extend their war against Israel to include the United States.
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
They must of went to the same suicide bomber/IED/head removal school as the Muslim terrorists.
Oh good, just what we need...Somalis terrorist coming across the border!
Ping!
Yet we sit here and do nothing. Worse than nothing because our officials say there is no problem. Our media will not report half of what happens in Mexico or the U.S. border or even in the interior related to Mexico on the nightly news and many of our citizens- including Republicans refuse to hear the truth instead believing the lies of the liberals. Many right here on FR refuse to believe the truth and think if we just give amnesty to all the illegals our border issues will evaporate.
We are going to wake one day to major terrorist attacks in this country due to terrorists crossing this border, at the same time the drug war will be raging here and our officials and most of our citizens will be stunned. I have never seen so many clueless people.
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