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Lob Bombs Newest Threat in Iraq

CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq — A new weapon has recently been unleashed on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, apparently this new threat has been dubbed the “Lob Bomb”
It’s not as if it is new technology, it is just using existing tech together to make a kind of roadside IED into a rocket assisted IED

Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, called the weapon “the greatest threat right now that we face,” and he compared the stealthy group behind it to the American military’s elite Delta Force.

The weapon is of particular concern because it is designed to cause severe damage and cannot be stopped once it has been fired.

An individual was detained on Thursday who Hammond said could provide valuable insights into the group behind the bomb making. “We think we have defined the network,” he said. He would not elaborate, although other American officers said in interviews that the group is Shiite and may have links to Iran.

“We think we might have picked up a guy that could expose the militant perpetrators,” Hammond said.

there are suspicions that this group may be related to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who’s Mahdi Army once held sway in the Sadr City section of Baghdad until U.S. and Iraqi forces gained control after seven weeks of fighting that ended in May.

Arguing against a link to such an al-Sadr initiative is the fact that the group that Hammond described has been operating since at least late 2007, although it has become more active in recent months.

The 107 mm rockets that are used in the improvised bombs, which some call an airborne version of the roadside IED’s that through the course of the war have been the top cause of casualties of U.S. troops are manufactured in Iran, officials said. It should however be cautioned to assume Iran is involved directly .

The weapons are launched from small trucks and are fired in multiples of four to nine rockets at a time. The detonation is sometimes triggered by a signal from a cell phone, other times by a washing machine timer.

Brig. Gen. Will Grimsley, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in a separate AP interview on Thursday that for lack of a better term he refers to the group as “the evil militia.” He said it is small and exhibits a high degree of technical skill in assembling the weapons and executing attacks.

The military calls the weapon an “improvised rocket-assisted mortar,” or IRAM.
Hammond said the perpetrators are so skilled that he has likened their organization to the U.S. military’s secretive and elite Delta Force. He said they have demonstrated an unusual degree of military skill and cunning.

“They don’t leave a forensic trail, and that just means we’re going to have to work a little bit longer” to eliminate them, he said. “Of everything we’ve had to deal with here, this is a tough one. They’re sort of the Delta Force of this enemy we face out there. They are very good” at covering their tracks, picking out targets and preserving secrecy about their membership and movements.

Tags: delta force, ied, iram, iraq war, lob bomb, weapon

Death Toll of War Drastically Underestimated

Trusted methods for estimating the death tolls of war typically get underestimated by a factor of three, say researchers who have developed a more accurate method for assessing fatalities.

Accurately estimating the death toll from wars is known to be difficult, and usually depends on a mixture of eyewitness reports and media coverage, a very sloppy and inaccurate method.

A database of such estimates covering the entire 20th century is kept by Uppsala University and the Peace Research Institute in Norway. However a new study suggests that for some periods the deaths recorded could have been up to three times higher.

Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, looked at death toll estimates gathered by the World Health Organization for selected countries.

The WHO figures are extrapolated from telephone interviews in which individuals are asked about family members who have died and are considered more accurate.

Iraq reduction

In most cases, the WHO surveys recorded much higher numbers of casualties than the Norwegian database. For example, the database records just over 2 million war deaths in Vietnam between 1955 and 2002, mainly due to the war with the US in 1965. But the WHO figures suggest twice as many people died.

When WHO survey results from another 12 countries were compared with the Norwegian figures, the WHO numbers come out on average three times higher.

If that correction is applied to the whole Norwegian database, the annual death total from wars between 1985 and 1994, the last period that the researchers looked at, is estimated at 378,000.

But the method suggests that one recent controversial mortality figure may be an over estimate. A survey published in 2006 put the death toll from the current Iraq conflict at over 600,000 – four times as high as previous studies had found.

But, based on eyewitness reports from the country and the revised method for correcting this figure, Obermeyer calculates that 184,000 people have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

Tags: death toll, iraq, iraq war, war

Iraq War: Soldier Refuses to Fight

Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love.”I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school,” the now 24-year-old told AFP.

“I was ‘filet mignon’ for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade,” or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the US army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.

“I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq,” Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

“My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation,” he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of “lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis.”

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had “self-medicated” for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier told AFP he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia — two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq — before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades’ testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking US officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of US contractors.

Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed US troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.

Goldsmith accused US officials of censorship.

“Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or Myspace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission,” Goldsmith told AFP after the hearing.

“You’re almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home.”

Officials take “hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president — and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq,” Goldsmith added.

Chiroux is one of thousands of US soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.

But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight “whatever charges the army levels at me.”

The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.

Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.

“I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem,” he told AFP.

Tags: illegal war, iraq, iraq war, war

Leaked U.K. Cabinet Office Paper Involving Iraq Invasion

Leaked Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action
The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.

PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY

IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials)

Summary

Ministers are invited to:

(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales for possible action.

(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours or international security, and abiding by its international obligations on WMD.

(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. This should include a call from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US military plans to the President on 4 August.

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Tags: iraq, iraq war, leaked information, secret, top secret, war

Iraq War: April had Highest U.S. Death Toll Since Last August

BAGHDAD - Fighting in Baghdad’s Shi’ite slum of Sadr City made April the deadliest month for Iraqi civilians since last August and for U.S. troops since last September, figures obtained on Wednesday showed.

Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed 968 civilian deaths in April, the most in eight months. On Wednesday the U.S. military reported the deaths of five more of its soldiers in Baghdad, raising its monthly toll to 49.

Most of the U.S. and Iraqi deaths were in the capital, where U.S. and government forces have been fighting Shi’ite militants loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the tightly-packed Sadr City slum and other Shi’ite areas.

U.S. forces said they killed another 16 fighters in gunfights, tank battles and strikes from drone aircraft, following heavy fighting on Tuesday in which they killed 34.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown against Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia a month ago in the southern city of Basra, said on Wednesday the government would disarm the fighters by force if they refuse to lay down their weapons.

Two hospitals in Sadr City said they alone had received the bodies of 421 Iraqis killed and treated more than 2,400 wounded since late March. Many of the dead and wounded have been civilians, caught in the crossfire in the crowded slum.

Some of the heaviest fighting has taken place in the past three days, with militiamen taking advantage of blinding dust storms that ground U.S. attack helicopters to launch large-scale ambushes of U.S. and Iraqi positions.

U.S. forces have responded with tank fire and surface-to-surface missiles, destroying buildings.

Thirty-four bodies and 112 wounded victims were brought to the two Sadr City hospitals in the last 24 hours, hospital officials said.

U.S. forces reported three soldiers killed in Baghdad overnight and another two killed on Wednesday afternoon.

April’s U.S. death toll is the highest since September 2007, when 65 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq, according to official figures tracked by icasualties.org, an independent website.

The tolls for both soldiers and civilians are still far lower than a year ago, however. In April 2007, 104 U.S. service members and 1,506 Iraqi civilians were killed.

U.S. commanders say the sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and Shi’ites that characterized earlier years remains sharply lower. But the uprising by Shi’ite militia over the past month has reversed a long trend of declining violence.

MALIKI SETS CONDITIONS

Maliki aimed some of his toughest language yet at the Shi’ite fighters on Wednesday, singling out the Mehdi Army by name and grouping it with Sunni Arab groups like al Qaeda as organizations that must be dissolved.

He set down four conditions — that militias disarm, stop interfering in state affairs, stop running their own courts and hand over wanted fugitives — or face a military assault.

“To refuse these conditions means the continuation of the government’s efforts to disarm them by force,” Maliki said at a news conference inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone government and diplomatic compound.

“There is no alternative to these conditions. The alternative is the continuation of force and clashes until we reach the end, to get rid of the weapons and the gangs who are carrying weapons.”

Maliki, himself a Shi’ite, launched a crackdown against Mehdi Army fighters last month in the southern city of Basra.

After initial setbacks, the Basra offensive appears to have been a success in driving fighters from the streets there. But the militiamen remain in control of much of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

Tags: casualties, iraq, iraq war, marines