Insurgent tactics more complex, deadly

BAGHDAD — When the sniper's bullet hit Billy Edwards, his Army brothers did not hesitate.

The 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division calls itself the "Send Me" brigade, and its soldiers were quick Saturday to send themselves to find the man who shot Spc. William Edwards, a wide-eyed 23-year-old from Houston. They quickly identified the house where they believed the assailant was hiding and moved in, as the sniper knew they would.

Inside the house, one soldier stepped on a pressure plate, detonating an estimated 30 pounds of explosives under a stairwell. In an instant, four troops were killed; four others were injured. Edwards died in the hospital. The sniper escaped.

The attack in Arab Jabour, southeast of Baghdad, was predicated on knowledge of the soldiers' sense of duty to a fallen comrade. But military commanders say the number of similar incidents — those in which soldiers are lured into a house rigged to explode — has risen dramatically across Iraq in recent months.

"The enemy is continually evolving tactics," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the U.S. offensive south of Baghdad, who described Saturday's events. "In this case, our guys followed their instincts to chase this guy down and got trapped."

The attack marked the first time that troops under Lynch's command have been killed by an house-borne improvised explosive device (IED), the official term for a house bomb. The tactic appears to have spread south from Diyala province, northeast of the capital, where three house bombs have killed several U.S. troops in the past two months. The military typically classifies house bombs with other IED attacks, so the exact number of Americans killed by the devices is difficult to determine.

On Monday, troops in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala, held a memorial service for four soldiers killed there by a house bomb Aug. 6. Twelve other troops were killed in that attack.

In Diyala, as in Arab Jabour, the strategy is considered a hallmark of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq, which has not asserted responsibility for Saturday's attack but wrote on an insurgent Web site that it was a cause for celebration.

While the military says the group's operations have been severely weakened across Iraq, the increased number of house-bomb attacks suggests that a significant number of al-Qaida in Iraq fighters are adapting to U.S. strategies and developing more advanced tactics of their own.

Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday the military has seen more incidents in recent months where explosives are placed in homes or buildings in Iraq and set to detonate when troops enter. While it is not a new technique, he said, it exploits a vulnerability that officials are working to counter.

The booby traps, which he described as small roadside bombs, have "been probably more prevalent in the past weeks and months than we had seen previously."

The growing use of house bombs is part of a larger pattern of more complex and coordinated attacks against U.S. forces by al-Qaida in Iraq. On May 12, soldiers in two parked Humvees were struck by a roadside bomb near Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, then ambushed by gunmen in a synchronized attack that the group said it had staged. Four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed in the ambush, and three soldiers were kidnapped. One was found dead; two remain missing.

Such mass-casualty attacks underscore the vulnerability of U.S. troops fighting enemies trained in guerrilla warfare and with extensive knowledge of Iraq's often-challenging terrain. In many areas south of Baghdad, where Saturday's house-bomb attack and the May ambush occurred, Americans are trying to win control from native Shiite and Sunni insurgent groups.

Officials attribute the increasingly sophisticated attacks to desperation on the insurgents' part after troops became too successful at finding roadside bombs and other explosives.

"It's a clear sign that they could not get to us by other means, and that's a good sign," said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a spokesman for the U.S. operation in northern Iraq, describing the pattern of house bombs. "Obviously we're countering the improvised explosive devices, and force on force, they know that they can't fight us."

But ambushes and rigged houses can cause many more casualties than smaller IEDs, which rarely kill more than one or two people. Increasingly, Donnelly said, insurgents are creating a "daisy chain" of house bombs, in which an initial explosion can trigger blasts up and down a block.

In addition, house bombs can be some of the most difficult explosives to detect because of the myriad ways they can be activated, Donnelly and others said. Some insurgents use powerful bombs or other munitions; others rely on homemade explosives. The blast can be set off by a trip wire, a pressure plate or a remote device.

"They are hard to find, but there is generally some sort of telltale sign," Donnelly said. "We just look for the signs and then deal with it the best we can."