About three years ago, Shiite militias in Iraq got a big weapons tech upgrade. Baghdad briefly became home to jury-rigged rocket bombs, explosives turned into artillery thanks to rockets, supposedly supplied by Iran's elite military force, which turned swaths of American bases into scrap and killed and injured dozens even when they malfunctioned.
Now, as the U.S. prepares to leave Iraq, those rockets are making a comeback -- and killing U.S. troops.
Take some sort of metal canister. Stuff it full of the explosive of your choice. Now strap rockets, typically 107 mm ones, to the apparatus to send it flying. Some use propane tanks full of blast material, weighing hundreds of pounds, and are fired off the backs of flatbed trucks. That's the Improvised Rocket Assisted Munition, or IRAM.
U.S. military officials are seeing them return to Iraq after a period of dormancy, where they're used to kill U.S. troops. IRAMs are credited with killing six U.S. troops during an attack last week on a Baghdad base. They're a key reason why June 2011 was the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq in two years, with 15 troops killed.
And they're a signature weapon of Shiite militias in Iraq that the U.S. says operate with the aid of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. As the U.S. completes a withdrawal from Iraq by December, "I think we are likely to see these Iranian-backed groups continue to maintain high attack levels," a spokesman for U.S. forces, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, tells the Wall Street Journal.
IRAMs aren't exactly new. The military started noticing them in Baghdad in 2008, a phenomenon the Long War Journal dubbed the "Flying IED." But unlike insurgents' homemade bombs that littered Baghdad's streets, the IRAM was a weapon for attacking an American base with crude artillery. They were an audacious weapon, "fired at close range, unlike most rockets, and [they] create much larger explosions," the Washington Post reported.
According to WikiLeaked military documents, "improvised rocket launchers" showed up in places like Mosul, the road to Samarra, Babil Province and near the southern city of Basra. The documents tend to connect the devices with insurgents casing out U.S. bases.
One advantage of the IRAM: Baghdad is lousy with propane tanks, making them an easy vessel for the bombs. Just add rockets and a flatbed. The U.S. responded by hunting down trucks with weird tubes sticking out, a telltale sign of an IRAM carrier.
But the return of the IRAM isn't attributable to an upgrade in sophistication. The U.S. military figures Iran and its Shiite proxies want a propaganda victory. What better way to yield one than to shoot deadly rocket-bombs at remaining soldiers as they pack their gear up and head home? It's an easy way to "claim credit for making us leave Iraq," Buchanan said.
Still, if those militias think the U.S. will really be gone-gone after December, they've got another thing coming. Vice Adm. William McRaven, the incoming leader of U.S. special operations forces, told a Senate panel last week he wants to keep some commandos in Iraq after a withdrawal, to hunt terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells. And McRaven also testified that his elite forces just love hunting networks of bomb-makers.
Photo: U.S. military slide of an IRAM, via the Long War Journal
See Also:- Iraqi Extremists’ New Weapon: ‘Flying IED’
