More Americans dying from roadside bombs in Iraq on Yahoo! News

By Mark Washburn, Knight Ridder Newspapers

CAMP ANACONDA, Iraq - Improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that insurgents build from castoff artillery shells and other munitions, have become the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq this year, despite a massive U.S. campaign to blunt their effectiveness.

American commanders have dispatched newly armored Humvees, Army engineers have begun a yearlong program to clear vegetation and debris along major transportation routes, and military technicians have equipped vehicles with devices that jam cell phones and garage-door openers, which are used to trigger the explosives.

In spite of those efforts, deaths due to IEDs rose by more than 41 percent in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period last year, and account for nearly 52 percent of the 261 U.S. combat deaths so far this year, according to statistics assembled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an Internet site that uses official casualty reports to organize deaths by a variety of criteria.

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The bombs became the focus of attention last December, when a Tennessee National Guardsman in Kuwait publicly complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he and others had been forced to scrounge for metal to armor the Humvees and other vehicles they had been issued to drive supplies into Iraq.

Since then, the Pentagon has shipped hundreds of armored Humvees to Iraq, added armor to those in the field and ordered unarmored vehicles to remain on protected bases.

Only 200 armored Humvees, mostly assigned to military police units, were in Iraq when insurgent violence began to rise in summer 2003. Now, about 9,000 of the 12,000 Humvees in Iraq have been armored. They're the workhorse vehicles for protecting the convoys that supply 140,000 troops across Iraq.

The insurgents have responded by creating bigger IEDs, often using 155 mm artillery shells linked in a series, which inflict multiple casualties even on hardened vehicles.

An explosion Jan. 5, for example, was so powerful that it ripped through an armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Baghdad, killing seven Army National Guardsmen from the 256th Infantry Brigade, based in Lafayette, La

Reuters Photo: Iraqi firemen extinguish a burning U.S. Army Humvee after it was struck by a roadside..

Without this brave soldier standing up to Rumsfeld, more soldiers may now be dead!

Semper Fi