"We Are All Hezbollah," Continued

Cory sends this picture and writes:

This was, at one point, a M1114 “Up-Armored� HMMWV in Iraq. It is now armored swiss cheese. 3 of the passengers in that truck are dead. How? We call them Explosively Formed Projectiles, or EFPs. The more familiar term is a “shaped charge.� It requires a decent amount of technical know-how to create a functioning homemade EFP.

Hizbollah used these frequently, starting during the 80s. About a year and a half ago, Hizbollah explosives experts began showing up in Iraq, training the insurgents on how to make them.

These types of IEDs cause a significant portion of the IED-related casualties in Iraq – the blood of our soldiers, serving right now, is already on Hizbollah’s collective hands. This is a picture of the biggest threat, right now, to a soldier’s life in Iraq.

I didn't find a cite to Hezbollah bomb-experts helping insurgets build bombs in Iraq, but I have found a NYT piece quoted by DefenseTech about Hezbollah's sponsor, Iran, doing so, and the article notes the shaped-charges closely match those used by Hezbollah:

- Many of the new, more sophisticated roadside bombs used to attack American and government forces in Iraq have been designed in Iran and shipped in from there, United States military and intelligence officials said Friday, raising the prospect of increased foreign help for Iraqi insurgents.

American commanders say the deadlier bombs could become more common as insurgent bomb makers learn the techniques to make the weapons themselves in Iraq.

...

Unlike the improvised explosive devices devised from Iraq's vast stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells and other arms, the new weapons are specially designed to destroy armored vehicles, military bomb experts say. The bombs feature shaped charges, which penetrate armor by focusing explosive power in a single direction and by firing a metal projectile embedded in the device into the target at high speed. The design is crude but effective if the vehicle's armor plating is struck at the correct angle, the experts said.

Since they first began appearing about two months ago, some of these devices have been seized, including one large shipment that was captured last week in northeast Iraq coming from Iran. But one senior military officer said "tens" of the devices had been smuggled in and used against allied forces, killing or wounding several Americans throughout Iraq in the past several weeks.

"These are among the most sophisticated and most lethal devices we've seen," said the senior officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate intelligence reports describing the bombs. "It's very serious."

Pentagon and intelligence officials say that some shipments of the new explosives have contained both components and fully manufactured devices, and may have been spirited into Iraq along the porous Iranian border by the Iranian-backed, anti-Israeli terrorist group Hezbollah, or by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. American commanders say these bombs closely matched those that Hezbollah has used against Israel.

The article is from August of last year.

Note: Originally I found the NYT article, and linked it. Then I saw DefenseTech had extensively quoted the article. So I linked DefenseTech instead.

Another rule of blogger etiqutte: Never link the NYT if it can possibly be avoided.

posted by Ace at 06:07 PM

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