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US begins to counter IED threat in Iraq
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| 14 March 2005 |
By GREG GRANT JDW Special Correspondent
Baghdad
Additional reporting Joshua Kucera JDW Staff Reporter
Washington DC
In recent months, US soldiers in the Baghdad area have located a larger than ever number of IEDs before they detonate, due partly to what is described by one intelligence officer as "sloppy ordnance work by second-tier contractors".
IEDs continue to be the single largest threat that coalition forces face in Iraq; there were 11,784 known IED-related incidents in 2004.
In Baghdad, the most active insurgent group remains the Ansar Al Sunna cell, reputed to have close ties to Jordanian terrorist Ayman Al-Zarqawi.
A widely heralded success against this group came in January with the capture by a US special operations group known as Task Force 626 of an Al-Zarqawi lieutenant named Abu Omar al-Kurdi. Al-Kurdi admitted to his interrogators that he was responsible for 80 per cent of the vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) attacks inside Baghdad, including the attack on the UN headquarters in 2003.
Other notable successes include a dramatic drop in the number of IED and VBIED attacks along the notoriously dangerous road that links the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad to the sprawling Baghdad International Airport.
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