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Early Risk for U.S. Ground
Troops: Region's Legacy of Land Mines A handful of countries refused to sign the 1997 international treaty banning the use of land mines. Among them: the United States and Iraq. Now, as U.S. troops prepare for war in Iraq, one of the world's most heavily mined countries, army commanders are scrambling to locate all the mines so they can be harmlessly detonated. Before burning oilfields or street-fighting Republican Guards, mines may be the first life-threatening obstacles U.S. troops confront as they advance into Iraq. Specialized troops based here with the Army's Third Infantry Division will be among the first to cross the border because it's their job to clear the path. Yesterday, mine-clearing troops hustled their equipment into place as this area's entire contingent of 4,000 soldiers hurriedly broke camp, shipping nonessential items elsewhere and preparing to don their chem-bio suits for the move north. “Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Baghdad we go,” one soldier sang while taking down his tent. There are old Iraqi land mines throughout Iraq — legacies of the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War and conflicts with northern Iraq's Kurds. The International Committee to Ban Landmines says they kill or maim hundreds of civilians in the country every year. American commanders say military intelligence indicates that Mr. Hussein has sprinkled the country with numerous fresh land mines. “He's got about 10 million mines in his inventory,” says Capt. Raphael Lopez, commander of one of the mine-clearing units here. There may even be some leftover American land mines from the Gulf War. The U.S. scattered 118,000 land mines in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991, mostly from planes and artillery devices. All were designed to harmlessly self-destruct or deactivate after no more than a few months, but land-mine opponents and ordnance experts say such designs aren't perfect. Kuwait paid contractors to clean up land mines and other unexploded bombs from its battlefields, and 84 workers were killed in the process, including two Americans, the U.S. General Accounting Office says. It's unclear whether cleanup efforts were undertaken in Iraq. “My guess is there probably are [some American mines left], but that's almost insignificant in comparison to the huge number that Iraq has deployed,” says Kenneth Bacon, a Clinton administration Pentagon official who lobbies against land mines as president of Refugees International. Iraq's arsenal is believed to be
a smorgasbord of the world's most insidious For the past few months, U.S. military-intelligence
officers have been trying to locate Mr. Hussein's newest minefields.
Much of their information comes from spy planes that use radar to
detect heat generated by metallic mines. There's also a fair amount
of guesswork: “We ask ourselves, where would we put our mines
if we were Saddam Hussein,” says First Sgt. William Secules,
an engineer with the mine-clearing unit. There may also be some surrounding Baghdad, military officials say. Refugees and smugglers crossing into northern Iraq from the Kirkuk area say some roads leading into that city have been mined, too, though those reports are unconfirmed. During the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqis put mines throughout Kuwait and in Iraq along the border, expecting U.S. troops to come from the south. The mines killed 12 U.S. troops and injured 69 — 6% of all American casualties in the war. But they avoided bigger mine losses by using the now-famous “left hook” approach, surprising Iraqi forces by coming through the desert from the west. American troops likely won't have the luxury of a left hook this time, since they are mostly massed to the south in Kuwait, and everybody — including Mr. Hussein — knows that. So they'll rely on mine-clearing equipment, military intelligence and explosive devices known as “miclics,” Army parlance for Mine Clearing Line Charges. Some soldiers get giddy when discussing the miclic. It's a trailer-mounted 5-inch rocket attached to a 350-foot hose-like line containing about 1,750 pounds of C4 explosives. When launched at the edge of a minefield, the device whistles as it snakes through the air for up to 100 yards and lands innocuously on the ground. Then the line is detonated by remote control from a nearby tank, exploding most mines in an area 9 yards wide by up to 100 yards long. “It's awesome,” says First Sgt. Secules, whose unit has dozens of miclics at its disposal. That clears a path for tanks equipped with plows that push aside remaining mines, some possibly blowing up harmlessly in the plowed earth. Then the area is deemed safe for other vehicles and foot soldiers. Thomas Houlahan, a land-mine expert at James Madison University, says these and other American mine-clearing devices “must be regarded as one of the Gulf War's greatest success stories.” Improvements made since will only help matters this time around, he adds. If all else fails, soldiers also are equipped with long barbecue-skewer-like devices — the time-tested, if-all-else-fails tool for getting out of a minefield. “Let's say I'm in a Humvee, and we run over a mine, and I'm blown out of the vehicle,” says Sgt. Secules. “Well, now I know I'm in a minefield.” To get out, soldiers are trained to probe their skewer — ever so slowly — into the ground before taking each step back to safety. It's a process that can take hours. Army officials here wanted to lay their own mines around some of the northernmost encampments in Kuwait, but Kuwaiti authorities wouldn't allow it. Army officials here say they have been instructed to refrain from laying mines, though that could change. Last week, a senior defense official told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. may use mines to deny Iraqis access to facilities containing weapons of mass destruction, which would be too dangerous to blow up. “These are air-deliverable,” the official explained, and “have a 24-hour or 48-hour self-destructing capability... so you could keep people from going in and taking something out of that facility” until coalition troops arrive to take it over permanently. The comment alarmed land-mine opponents. “The problem is that some land mines that are supposed to self-destruct don't,” says Mr. Bacon. “So the possibility is that they will remain as hidden killers.” Phil Kuntz in Washington and Farnaz Fassihi in Suleymania, Iraq, contributed to this article. |
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For more on the Mine Ban Treaty, go to www.icbl.org |