Dismantle bombs – or die trying
Welcome to the life of a bomb defuser in the deadly, explosive-laden, sniper-bedevilled city of Mosul, Iraq.
IT is only days before he is due to return home on leave, and commanders send him behind enemy lines for one last mission: take some of the explosives the Iraqi army has salvaged from Islamic State (IS) and resow them like deadly seeds in the no man’s land they call “ard al haram” – the forbidden zone – in Mosul.
IS infiltrators have been stealthily crossing through the deserted stretch of abandoned homes and barricaded businesses to mount attacks against Iraqi troops; the explosives are meant to stop them.
Like many young soldiers, Wissam Daoud, a bomb technician with the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s Emergency Response Division, has been fighting for three years to drive the militants out. He has tracked the evolution of their explosives through half a dozen offensives, and can identify them at a glance: the lemsawi, modified mortar rockets; kamala, which can be triggered remotely or by applying pressure; bottle bombs attached to doors; plasma bombs camouflaged as household items or debris.
His job is to render them harmless, or turn them back against the enemy, or die trying.
Daoud’s army is no longer the one that turned and fled when fast-moving jihadi militants seized Mosul in 2014. Just as the Iraqi military has hardened through training and combat, so has he.
Dying in an explosion is no longer the 25-year-old Daoud’s worst fear. That, he’s come to realise, would be painless – he carries an Iraqi flag in his pants pocket, to be draped over his body should the need arise.
What Daoud has learned to fear is a sniper’s bullet. Bombs you can see. Snipers are elusive. Their bullets leave soldiers bedridden, permanently disabled.
“Better to die than to be injured,” Daoud says. “No one cares about you in Iraq when you are injured.”
More than a dozen of his friends have been shot by snipers, and he knows how it goes. Bomb defusers are paid about US$1,000 (RM4,200) a month, the same as other soldiers, and when they’re injured and off duty, the pay gets reduced. Daoud has helped cover injured comrades’ hospital bills, and has still seen them languish at home, unable to afford surgeries, medicine and other care the government does not provide.
Daoud’s father was also a bomb defuser; he lost three fingers during the war with Iran in the 1980s. He told Daoud not to come home injured. They laughed, but neither considered it a joke.
Iraqi commanders have refused to release military casualty figures since the Mosul offensive started on Oct 17, saying they’re bad for morale. But Daoud knows they are high: 200 of his friends have died, many of them young defusers with families.
Daoud prepares his 10-man team for the possibility of a bad outcome each time they set out. “Either I will hold you,” he tells them, “or you will hold me.”
His longtime mentor will be shot by a sniper on an upcoming mission. His assistant will die before his eyes. And Daoud, a devout Muslim who joined the military out of religious duty, will have to decide the price he is willing to pay to defeat the elusive, blackflagged IS extremists who have declared his country their caliphate.
Things fall apart
Since the offensive to retake Mosul started in the last quarter of 2016, Daoud has defused hundreds of incendiary devices. He keeps them around the abandoned home where his unit is billeted at the edge of west Mosul.
Before setting off for the forbidden zone, Daoud dumps a salvaged suicide belt next to his bed, sets a sausage-shaped IED (improvised explosive device) in the living room, and stacks mortar rounds by the front door. He pauses to demonstrate IS bomb triggers fashioned from syringes and clear plastic fishing line. This is why he cautions children he sees in freed areas of west Mosul not to play with junk they find in abandoned storefronts.
“One small mistake,” says the shaggy haired, chain-smoking, veteran bomb technician, “and you’re dead.”
Daoud’s two brothers are also bomb defusers. He grew up tinkering with electronics in Baghdad, later volunteering to defuse bombs militants planted in his blue-collar Shaab neighbourhood.
He has seen plenty of civilians killed by IS explosives. In January, his team was pinned down by snipers while trying to rescue a family fleeing east Mosul, who then set off a booby trap. He found their bodies in the street, including a newborn.
Daoud has been injured twice. Two years ago, he stepped on a bomb while fleeing an IS sniper, breaking bones in his chest. He still has trouble sleeping because of the injury. More recently, he cut his right leg while destroying a bomb he found at Mosul airport.
Before Daoud ventures into the forbidden zone for his latest mission, his mother calls him, distraught. She’s just seen the bodies of several soldiers killed in Mosul returned to neighbours.
“I’m worried about you,” she sobs. “I saw on the TV the troops reached Ashur Hotel.”
Daoud had been at the hotel the day before, defusing bombs. That morning, his team had removed half a dozen mortar rounds and homemade bombs from a Mosul house, and he had joked, “If I keep doing this, I won’t ever have any babies!” He is still single, having postponed marriage until after Iraqi forces recapture Mosul entirely.
But he doesn’t want his mother to worry. So he smiles, and reassures her in a soft voice that he is not on the front lines.
On the day things fall apart in the forbidden zone, Daoud is defusing bombs in a hotel in what was once Mosul’s city centre.
By 4pm, he is itching to leave, afraid militants are lurking nearby.
“I think it’s time to go back,” he tells his commander.
But Maj Hussam Hashash, 38, chubby and balding with a thick moustache, wants to stay another half hour to check a house.