Cheap Chinese-made sensors. Mad Max-style vehicle mods. Consumer drones turned into mortar-dropping weapons. The fight against Daesh is showing the high-tech, higher stakes future of urban war.
Lieutenant Ahmed Abbas Ali burns his finger as he lights the fuse on his chunk of C-4 plastic explosive. A momentary flash of pain pushes aside all thoughts of the car bomb. He’s bent over a battered white Chevrolet saloon containing several canisters of explosives wired to an incredibly sensitive pressure trigger. Ali had defused two nearby improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the past half hour, cutting the wires of bombs half buried by the roadside. This one, though, is too dangerous to tamper with. It is one of Daesh’s newest and most dangerous IEDs, the same design that had killed several of his comrades over the past few months. So he decides to blow it up.
The car is parked on a quiet street in west Mosul’s Islah al-Zarai, a middle-class district of two- and three-storey houses sprawled behind concrete walls. Iraqi forces had retaken it from Daesh a fortnight previously there was still fighting nearby. Some local residents had already returned to their homes. Others never left.
The dozen or so soldiers acting as an escort to Ali’s four-strong explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) unit hammer on metal gates along the street, shouting orders to clear the block as men, women and children emerge squinting into the fierce June sunshine. An officer radioes in the co-ordinates to a command post and, in brisk Arabic, requests permission to detonate.
“Are there civilians?” comes the response.
“Yes but we’ve warned them all and secured the roads.”
“OK. Begin.”
Ali, a 23-year-old with a neat moustache, thick eyebrows and customary camouflage cap, produces a brown stick of pliable C-4 from his trouser pocket, then takes a multitool and slices off a piece the size of a child’s fist. He cuts a short test length of white fuse, lights it to check it’s not damp and tosses it to the pavement, where it fizzes for a few seconds. Satisfied, he takes a 30-centimetre section – enough to burn for around a minute – and attaches it to a detonating cap pushed into the plastic explosive. Last come three bottles of drinking water, which he and a comrade position around it with a large roll of sticky tape.
With the area cleared, Ali walks towards the Chevrolet and attaches the package to its boot, where the expanding water will activate the trigger. A team-mate pulls their Ford pickup close and keeps it running as he sparks a plastic cigarette lighter and holds it to the fuse. He was careful not to swear when it flared up and scorched his middle finger; it’s the holy month of Ramadan, when cursing is forbidden. His mind snaps back to the job and he runs for the pickup, the fuse burning faster than he anticipated. They accelerate hard towards a breeze-block and corrugated-iron fruit shop, where the other men have already retreated.
Suddenly, a youth on a scooter appears, driving blithely towards them. Ali and his men scream at him to stop. He comes to an abrupt halt as the IED explodes with a thud that rattles the roof.
The soldiers wait for any stray pieces of shrapnel to land, then walk back to what’s left of the wrecked Chevrolet. Flames and thick black smoke pour out. The street is cracked and blackened. The car lets out a series of small pops and bangs, so they back off, shrug, return to their vehicles and drive back towards their base. “That,” Ali said later, “was a quiet day.”
Source: Wired