KANDAHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – The Taliban throw in everything but the kitchen sink when they cook up deadly improvised explosive devices.
Even electric cooking pots become weapons of mass destruction. To activate the lethal bombs, insurgents bury the crockpots in the ground next to a road or footpath and set the switch to “cook.”
“They also use old artillery shells stuffed with spoons, forks and belt buckles, or any other metal they can find,” said a Canadian soldier who’s been wounded by three IED blasts in this rural southern Afghanistan province. “It’s like a big grenade.”
The Taliban’s increasing improvisation on IEDs – which account for most U.S. war casualties – is a worrisome trend in the Afghan war.
They can be turned on or off with switches, cell phones or connecting a wire, such as during nighttime when U.S. patrols are often mounted.
“It just blew up in my face,” recalled a Special Forces team sergeant one recent afternoon at a base near Kandahar, describing how an IED hit him on patrol.
His team was on foot with Afghan commandos when someone stepped on a pressure-plate activated bomb hidden on a trail. The blast tore apart one of the Afghan troops and gave the sergeant a concussion.
“I was completely out of it,” said the Green Beret, who cannot be named because of his classified missions.
A week later, half his face was covered with whiskers where the brunt of the blast hit him. He can’t shave the wound yet.
The team sergeant, from Oakland, Calif., talks out of the other side of his mouth, and his right eardrum is likely permanently damaged.
Four U.S. operators on his team have been wounded in the past two missions by IEDs or gunfire.
“There’s my replacement,” the team sergeant said, pointing to a wounded comrade hobbling across the compound on a cane. “You see some gnarly s–t out there.”
Unlike Iraq, or earlier in this war, the Taliban prefer to bomb individual soldiers undertaking “dismounted” patrols rather than in vehicles.
“It’s mostly pressure plate IEDs now. It takes too much manpower to build an IED to take out a truck,” another Canadian trooper said.
Coalition troops on patrol use cellular jammers, which aggravate anybody at a forward operating base trying to make a call home on a mobile phone or get email on a BlackBerry. But the gadgets save lives.
The Taliban have had years to study U.S. tactics, techniques and procedures and even know the most likely spots on the ground an American will drive or walk across, soldiers say.
“It’s not random. All their stuff is thought out,” said a Special Forces captain.
After observing troopers from the Ft. Drum-based 10th Mountain Division drive the same piece of road southwest of Kandahar, the Taliban hit a patrol on July 5 with a sophisticated IED that suggested Al Qaeda bombcraft.
Pfc. Edwin Wood and Sgt. Christopher Cabacoy were killed when a pressure plate bomb wired with a 600-ft. cord attached to a cell phone obliterated the cab of their truck.
