Atul Ramesh Deshpande

Founder of Telecomblogs India

(This is first of the series of article I want to write about IEDs which are used in Delhi Bomb Blast. I am no expert in any of the technologies involved, but after reading news and other data I felt that we are less aware of technology involved in terror strike. So my perspective is that can we tackle technology with technology? Or Is it the social networking behind these terror attacks are real thing to break? Countering IEDs will certainly involve technology as well as destructing  the terror network starting from people who emplace bombs to people who made them and who provided material for making such bombs)

I was reading few of the articles in leading dailies about Delhi Bomb blast. It was horrible. But more horrible is our disaster management system. What happened after Delhi Bomb Blast (BB) can be read at rediff.com front page story. One more thing missed by almost all of them was material used in Delhi Bomb Blast and how it was emplaced at different locations. We need to shed some more light on this part of the story. This gives some hint to us that our security agencies are still not clear of the task ahead and guesses/predictions are almost done with maximum random errors.

Improvised Explosives devices i.e. IEDs were used in Delhi Bomb Blast. Earlier explosions used RDX in major quantity. Police were saying that same material is used in Ahmedabad and Jaipur BB. But how much do we know about the new weapon of mass destruction used by so call SIMI group? How much are we sure of its usage? How much we know the technology behind IEDs and different ways to emplace them? Lets find out these things in some details.

Let me start with what is happening in Iraq & Afghan these days. As of the end of June, IEDs have killed untold thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, as well as 1795 coalition military people in Iraq and another 231 in Afghanistan, according to the Web site iCasualties.org. Those figures are nearly half of all combat fatalities in Iraq and roughly 30 percent of those in Afghanistan, according to the site.

IED fatalities in Iraq were down sharply in May and June, to 14 and 11, according to iCasualties. But they were up in Afghanistan, to 12 in May and 22 in June. Overall, in the first half of this year, IEDs, including suicide bombs, killed 115 coalition people in Iraq and 72 in Afghanistan. Those figures mean that in the first half of 2008, IEDs caused 54 percent of all coalition deaths (including nonhostile ones) in Iraq and 59 ­percent in Afghanistan.

Ok, so you got it now. IEDs are favored weapons of terrorists all over the world and it is only recently it got introduced on Indian soil after Ahmedbad and Jaipur BB, if I have believe daily report of national new papers. So first thing is clear that SIMI has access to global terror link. May be with Iraq or Iran or Inside Pak or anything possible. So it is wrong to say that only Jaish the Pak based terror group is training SIMI militants is wrong, but that is closet possible link.

Now below are few facts which might make clear the impact of IEDs.The scale and urgency of the struggle to devise an effective response to IEDS reflects not just the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan but also an almost universal consensus among military analysts and government officials that the IED problem will long outlive those conflicts. Lots of facts support that view, but start with this one: outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, there are 200 to 350 IED attacks every month around the world, according to the Triton report, which is published periodically by the British counter-IED consulting firm Hazard Management Solutions. IED attacks are particularly common in Colombia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia (Chechnya), and Sri Lanka.

In Pakistan alone, IEDs, including suicide bombs, killed 865 security people and officials last year, according to testimony in the U.S. Senate in February. In 2006, British officials dealt with 250 IEDs in the UK, according to Andy Trotter, deputy chief constable of the British Transport Police. They were planted by “criminals, animal rights activists, disturbed individuals, and terrorists,” Trotter says.

Now look who are the people actually planting it. There is a big list of people involved in placing the IEDs at final location. According to me, this is not a simple task but the social chain involved in this process is so huge that after reading it you will feel that it is very easy to emplace a IEDs bomb at crowded place. If some freelance criminals or even rag pickers are involved how are we going to know it? This is a big question to tackle and this is one aspect of counter measure of IEDs.

Now lets trace back the history of IEDs.IEDs aren’t new. In World War II, Belorussian guerillas used them against the German army. The Vietcong made them out of unexploded U.S. ordnance during the Vietnam War. The mujahideen used IEDs in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the Soviets.

But it was the Irish Republican Army that first demonstrated the level of havoc that homemade bombs could create in a sustained campaign. Over 37 years, from the early 1970s until the late 1990s, the IRA targeted infrastructure and British soldiers and achieved a complete spectrum of development of the IED from simple, crude devices to quite sophisticated devices. In the early 1970s, the British Army was dealing with as many as 1400 IED detonations a year.

That’s how many occur in Iraq and Afghanistan in three or four months.

So IED threat is long term and SIMI doesn’t want to fight Indian Army force-on-force. Neither Pak wants to do it. IEDs have capability to inflict damage, political and psychological.

So the problem at hand is no simple. The shift from RDX to IEDs hasn't come in a single day or not in a month. It requires a lots of background work to use IEDs in a terror strike. But the pace at which SIMI is going makes us feel that there is something more involved other than technology. Within few months of Ahmedabad strike, they hit national capital with so east and accuracy that it surprises and shocks us to know how capable SIMI is with its new armor and with huge terror network involved in all these bomb blast.

The terror mail sent from one of the email ids of yahoo.com from Mumbai gives us the hint that what will happen next. In the next blog of this series I will discuss the technical details of IEDs and other things.