No man’s land

[unhappycamper]

A ruined building sits vacant outside the town of Bowadish in Iraq’s southwest Diyala province. Bowadish and many villages in the area have been abandoned for more than a year after insurgents rigged houses with bombs and intimidated rural residents in a coordinated campaign. U.S. troops have yet to do a thorough analysis of houses in the area to determine whether houses like this one were indeed destroyed by insurgent bombs. Many houses remain booby-trapped.


No man’s land
By Heath Druzin, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, November 20, 2008

BOWADISH, Iraq — Once part of the breadbasket of Diyala province, the flat, dusty plain surrounding this ghostly collection of mud huts sprouts brown, scrubby stubble and little else these days. The lifeless soil mirrors the town, empty since a terror campaign by insurgents chased residents away more than a year ago.

Across an agricultural belt in the southwest portion of the province, insurgents went village to village more than a year ago, intimidating farmers and often rigging homes with explosives and trip wires, in some cases rendering entire towns one giant bomb. Most of the bombs still lie in wait for an errant step.

The results have been deadly. In January, six U.S. troops and an Iraqi interpreter were killed when a booby-trapped house detonated in Agadat. In the past two weeks, four soldiers were wounded in two separate bombings in Diyala.

The campaign, led by al-Qaida in Iraq, coincided with a crippling drought, has also dealt a blow to agriculture in the province and strained public resources, with more than 3,000 people, many of them farmers, still displaced and often living jobless in the nearby city of Buhritz.

Many houses remain rigged, and many towns are abandoned. U.S. forces have yet to do a thorough inventory, so it’s unclear how many houses in towns like Bowadish may be booby-trapped. Troops have adjusted to the landscape and treat entering houses with much more care than they used to, said 1st Lt. Thomas Maney, of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=58930



uhc comment: The Electric Strawberry was doing this same shit 38 years ago in Vietnam outside of Cu Chi.