Let Our Cities Be Our Swamps And Our Buildings Our Jungles

“People say to me, ‘You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps,'” Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is quoted as telling a University of Warwick researcher six months ago. “I reply, ‘Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles'”.

IED attacks in Iraq can be traced to the very organizations most loyal to Saddam Hussein. M-21 wasn’t the only unit trained in IEDs. During an inspection of the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s training academy in Baghdad in April 1997, I saw classrooms for training all Iraqi covert agents in the black art of making and using IEDs. My notes recall tables piled with mockups of mines and grenades disguised in dolls, stuffed animals, and food containers – and classrooms for training in making car bombs and recruiting proxy agents for using explosives.