ISIS Booby Traps and IEDS Have Slowed Iraqi Offensive to Retake Ramadi to a Crawl

Islamic State Lays Booby Traps in Ramadi

Karen Leigh and Ghassan Adnan , Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2015

BAGHDAD—Islamic State is laying sophisticated booby traps in Ramadi to thwart an Iraqi offensive, with devices that can trigger an explosive domino effect and snipers who target bomb-disposal experts, military officials said on Sunday.

After seizing Ramadi in May, the militants connected large, scattered webs of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, to one trigger wire, expanding the reach of an individual bomb. Iraqi military officials said the booby traps are delaying an offensive to retake the city.

“All of the delays we’re having, the reason was the heavy planting of IEDs,” said Gen. Hattem Al Magsosi, the head of the army’s Explosive Ordnance Division.

Islamic State’s use of IEDs has allowed small groups of insurgents to maintain control of cities against overwhelming numbers of troops, Iraqi military officials said.

Iraqi personnel have come to anticipate such traps after recent battles such as the November operation in the northern city of Sinjar. The Ramadi operation, backed by a U.S.-led air coalition, was expected to closely follow the victory in Sinjar, when Kurdish-led forces routed the militants and dismantled roughly 1,000 IEDs.

But the offensive to retake one of the militant group’s biggest strongholds has stalled repeatedly. Iraqi forces cite IEDs as the latest reason the fighting for the heart of the city hasn’t yet begun.

Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition in Iraq, said U.S. forces aren’t present on the ground in Ramadi to evaluate the situation, but they stand behind Iraqi officials’ assessment.

The Iraqi army’s attempt to retake the city after a decisive Islamic State victory there in May is widely seen as a test of preparedness for a planned future offensive in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the most populous under the group’s control.

Ramadi, about 60 miles west of the capital of Baghdad, is surrounded by farmland that is also now heavily fortified with IEDs.

In recent months, Islamic State laid a new layer of IEDs alongside the ones it placed after it took the city last spring, leaving Iraqi security forces with even more deadly explosives to defuse than in previous battles with the extremist group.

“For sure, there will be new ways in Ramadi,” said Ammar Sadoun, an Explosive Ordnance Division engineer advising on operations in the city. “Today they’re using cellphone IEDs. By the time we figure out how to stop that, they’ll have the next thing,” he said, speaking at the EOD’s base near Baghdad’s international airport.

Last year, Mr. Sadoun’s right leg was severed below the knee while he worked to dismantle an IED in the contested refinery city of Beiji. He had fallen victim to one of Islamic State’s ploys that target engineers. The army calls it “double bluffing”—remotely exploding a hidden device as the man works to dismantle a clearly marked twin.

“They use tricks,” he said. “Always they are a step ahead of you, no matter how smart you are.”

The army must also operate with shrinking ranks of EOD specialists, whose engineers dismantle the bombs in the field. Casualties and deserters are mounting while new recruits are discouraged by the job’s extreme risk.

One of the greatest dangers is snipers picking off bomb-disposal experts, said Ghanim Abdul Jawad, commander of a unit fighting in Ramadi.

“We do expect that we’re going to suffer more than before because we’re short IED experts,” he said.

Of the 200 experts in Mr. Jawad’s unit, 25 have been killed and 60 injured since the fight against Islamic State began in 2014, he said.

“We kept on demanding that army commanders send more explosives-disposal teams to Ramadi,” said Ibrahim al-Fahdawi, head of security in Khaldiya, an area southeast of Ramadi. “But nothing happened.”