ClearingMosul of bombs is next mission
After nine months of vicious street-to-street fighting to drive the Islamic State out of Mosul, it could take many years more to fully remove explosives and other munitions from what was once one of Iraq’s most populous cities, U.S. State Department officials said.
“When I look around the world in some ways there’s nothing like Mosul that we’ve encountered,”said Stanley Brown, the director of State’s Office ofWeapons Removal and Abatement. “The level of contamination though is not one of those where we’re talking weeks and months, we’re talking years and maybe decades.”
Over three years of occupation, the Islamic State mined and booby-trapped large sections ofMosul.
Heavy combat has also littered the city with unexploded ordnance such as artillery shells and hand grenades.
In thewestern reaches of the city, where the fighting was especially fierce, massive debris fields will need to be removed to clear the ground beneath.
Pehr Lodhammar, the senior programmanagerfor the United Nations Mine Action Service, or UNMAS, in Iraq said the State Department’s clearance estimate could be accurate, but added his team is still assessing explosive contamination levels in western Mosul.
“It’s hard to scope,” he said.
The Islamic State’s grip on the city, which began in the summer of 2014, allowed the militants to experiment with, refine and even industrialize their improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
While the explosives in theweapons are basic, their triggering devices are some of the most complex deminers have seen, according to U.S. and U.N. officials. They often involve multiple anti-tampering mechanisms and triggers that are undetectable to metal detectors, the officials said.
In addition to booby traps, the tens of thousands of rounds of explosive ammunition fired by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces are estimated to have had a roughly 10 percent failure rate, said Lodhammar, adding that the Islamic State, with its home-built munitions, had an even higher failure rate.
All of that material have to be disposed of destroyed.
“It sounds like a nightmare problem for bomb disposal technicians,” said John Ismay, a former Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer now a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International.
“The hazard won’t be gone until every last bit of rubble is cleared away,” he said.
Solomon Black, a program manager at the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, said the amount of explosives remaining in Mosul is “incomparable to anywhere else we’ve encountered in Iraq.”
He said Iraqis on the ground have said that many of the explosive devices have been planted around key infrastructure in the city, 90 percent of which is damaged, adding to the difficulty of clearance.
“They want to keep the water from running, they want to keep the lights out, and they want to keep people fromcoming back to their homes,” Black said of the Islamic State.
BothU.S. andU.N. efforts are concentrated on demining areas withwater treatment, power plants and other crucial infrastructure in a bid to get people back to their homes and restore some semblance of normalcy in the city.
Mosul had a prewar population of 2 million, but tens of thousands of residents have died or fled from the fighting and will have to navigate the risks from unexploded munitions when they return home. grasp the will and
Both the U.N.’s Mine Action Service and the State Department have dedicated significant resources to warning civilians about the dangers of unexploded munitions and booby traps.
At entry points into Mosul, the U.N. is handing out leaflets for residents returning to their homes and holding classes at some of the refugee camps on the city’s outskirts.
“They turned our house into a weapon against the army,” said a young woman in eastMosul who gave her name as Qammar. “It makes me cry when I think about it.”
Islamic State booby traps have been found in vacuum cleaners, couches, ovens and other everyday items, John Ismay, a former Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, now a senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International
officials said.
Residents evacuated from several of Mosul’s western districts also said last week that the militants had also mined the road residents had tried to flee along.
For 23-year-old Muhammed Nabila that meant watching from the window as his cousin died testing the route.
“The explosion seemed
to come out of nowhere,” he said. “He lost both his legs at the side of the road. No one was allowed to recover his body for days.”
A lack of trained personnel and resources remains one of the biggest impediments to operations.
Iraqis working with U.S. and European contractors will have to be taught how to handle some of the more sophisticated booby traps.
More than any other polar bears have the poster cub climate change.
Al Gore used a cartoon of an exhausted, endlessly swimming polar bear to illustrate the impacthumans were having on the sea ice where the bears once hunted.
Coca-Cola raised $2 million for arctic polar bears and decorated the website for the habitat preservation campaign with an adorable picture of a cub. And agency after agency haswarned that climate change could make polar bears extinct by 2050.
But a group of scientists has posited another potential impact of global warming on polar bears, and it’s not nearly so adorable.
It involves you being lunch.
The paper, published this month, is titled: “Polar Bear Attacks on Humans: Implications of a Changing Climate.” The researchers represent government wildlife agencies and preservation organizations from the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway and other countries.
The higher global temperaturesgo, the researchers said, the more likely polar bears are to interact with humans — and possibly attack and eat them.
For hungry bears, ice floating on the sea is a perfect hunting ground. They stake out breaks in the ice that calorie-dense seals use as breathing holes. The bears wait for the marine mammals to surface or use the icy cover to creep up on sunning seals — then pounce.
But warmer temperatures mean less ice, which tilts the Darwinian game of hide-and-seek in the seals’ favor.
“But a bear’s still got to eat,” said Geoff York, with Polar Bears International, who is one of the study’s authors and has survived three encounters with aggressive polar bears. “They’re more likely to try new things, and sometimes, that might be us.”
The researchers analyzed decades of polar bear attacks, dating from the 1870s. They included one particularly gruesome story of a polar bear chomping on 16th-century Russian explorers, but the data gathered from media reports, law enforcement and government records became more consistent in the 1960s.
They found that “the greatest number of polar bear attacks occurred in the partial decade of 2010-2014, which was characterized by historically low summer sea ice extent and long ice-free periods,” according to the study. Fifteen attacks happened in that period.
Most attacks happened in field camps and with people traveling across the landscape — places where people expect to find polar bears and typically take precautions. About 27 percent happened in towns. animal, become for