Roadside Bombs

Khalid Fazly arrived on U.S. soil last month carrying his mother's homemade cookies, a prayer rug, dried dates and thousands in $100 bills tucked into his trousers. He was pretty certain he was prepared for America. Except for a car trip to Pakistan, Fazly had never been outside Afghanistan. Now he almost certainly is the only freshman at Indiana's Ball State University who has been threatened with death by the Taliban, survived insurgent ambushes and braved roadside bombs. In Afghanistan, Fazly worked as a translator and "fixer," or problem-solver.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A roadside bomb detonated under a bus in Afghanistan on Monday, killing nine civilians, officials said. It was the latest in a string of attacks over the past week that have left noncombatants dead. The bus was driving from the southern province of Ghazni to Kabul when the blast ripped it apart about 8:30 a.m. in the Sayedabad district of troubled Wardak province, said Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor. The attack also injured 21 people, including six women and four children.

Roadside bombs killed at least 17 Afghan civilians in a 24-hour span, including nine people ? a child among them ? whose vehicle was torn apart by a powerful blast Sunday as they were on their way to a wedding in northern Afghanistan. Civilians are dying in record numbers as the war in Afghanistan grinds into its 10th year, and crude but powerful homemade bombs are the greatest hazard facing them. Insurgents plant the devices with the aim of killing Western troops, but more often it is noncombatants who are left dead or maimed.

In 2009, Vils Galarza's parents resisted when he told them that he wanted to join the Army after high school in Salinas. They wanted him to go to college, and he already had acceptance letters in hand. If he had to join the military, they told him, couldn't he pick a trade that would provide him some modicum of safety - working as a truck driver, perhaps, or a mechanic? Galarza told them that not only would he enlist, but he wanted to be an infantryman - to experience the vaunted tradition of having his boots on the ground.

Two civilians were wounded in southern Lebanon on Friday by a roadside bomb apparently intended for Israeli troops or their local militia allies, police said. They said the blast occurred at the village of Taibe in the eastern sector of Israel's self-declared border "security zone." Militiamen of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army fired heavy machine guns in the area after the bomb exploded, they said.

Bombs used with deadly effect against U.S. troops in Iraq have recently become more powerful, the latest escalation in the insurgency, Pentagon officials said Friday. Army Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez said insurgents had greatly increased the destructive power of roadside bombs by packing more explosives into the munitions, which the military calls improvised explosive devices.

U.S. Defense officials said Thursday that Iraqi insurgents have sharply curtailed the use of their most powerful roadside bombs, weapons American officials repeatedly have charged are being smuggled into the war zone from Iran. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said it was too soon to tell whether the decline in the use of the munitions resulted from an Iranian pledge to stem the flow of weaponry between the two countries. Tehran has denied that it is providing munitions to Iraqi insurgents.

The chaplain and the medic noticed it first: a pile of freshly upturned soil at the side of the highway. The two men were part of a combat engineer patrol searching for roadside bombs, the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Riding inside a "Buffalo," an armor-plated vehicle equipped with a mechanical boom, they stopped to investigate.

A mortar attack on a sprawling U.S. Army base in central Iraq and a roadside bomb on a dangerous thoroughfare outside the capital killed three American soldiers, the military said Saturday. All three deaths occurred Friday -- the same day another U.S. soldier died when an American observation helicopter was downed by insurgents west of Baghdad -- but were not immediately disclosed by the Army.

The U.S. military said Saturday that a female soldier died Thursday in a roadside bomb attack on her patrol south of Baghdad, the 90th American servicewoman killed since the invasion. Servicewomen are not assigned to offensive combat missions in Iraq, but they often participate in raids, patrols and other active duty in a variety of roles, such as flying helicopters or dealing with Iraqi women during U.S. operations.

Author Janet Malcolm once acidly wrote that any reporter who didn't agree that journalism was a "morally indefensible" act of betrayal was "too stupid or too full of himself" to notice what was going on. Michael Hastings doesn't agree. He sees journalism, particularly when writing about media-greedy public figures, as being "like the seduction of a prostitute. " In other words, publicity hounds who try to co-opt honest reporters get what they deserve. That helps explain the mystery of why U.S. ArmyGen.

Reporting from Camp Pendleton -- U.S. combat troops have departed from Iraq, but one last — and highly controversial — chapter of the long war there is being played out at Camp Pendleton. After years of delay and legal wrangling, the court-martial of the last of eight Marines charged in the shooting deaths of 24 Iraqis in the village of Haditha in 2005 is under way — with Marines with combat experience sitting as jurors. Opening statements are expected to begin Friday. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, now 31, was on his first combat deployment when a roadside bomb killed one Marine and injured two others from his squad.

Two days after Army Staff Sgt. James M. Christen's death in Afghanistan this summer, his family and friends created a memorial page on Facebook. They shared photos and memories of Christen, 29, from the Placer County town of Loomis, northeast of Sacramento, as well of words of encouragement to his wife, Lauren, to whom he was married for eight years. "I will forever be proud of my husband for all [he] did and will miss him every second of everyday," his wife wrote on the website.

Radio-control parts hidden in roadside bombs in Iraq have been traced to a company in Minnesota, prompting a federal grand jury Tuesday to indict five people in an alleged smuggling ring that sent up to 6,000 of the devices from this country to Iran for use against U.S. military personnel. The alleged plot, run by a group of citizens of Singapore, was designed to skirt U.S. laws against conducting business with Iran, authorities said, adding that they hoped to extradite the defendants for trial in Washington.

Fresh out of high school, Ramon Mora Jr. saw no limits to his dreams: He could become a veterinarian. Or a stock market wizard. Maybe even an ace helicopter pilot. "His mind was really open and clear," said his grandfather, Baltazar Mora of Ontario . The elder Mora and his wife, Maria Theresa, helped raise their grandson for most of his life. His 19 years presented challenges at times, bumps in the road that he doggedly overcame — always determined, always looking forward.

When Pfc. Colton Rusk was shot in Afghanistan by a Taliban sniper, a Marine dog named Eli immediately ran to him, guarding the downed Marine against further attack. Even Marines who rushed to Rusk's side were initially kept at bay by the snarling Labrador, who had been Rusk's inseparable companion through training and then deployment to a dangerous place called the Sangin Valley. Rusk, 20, a machine gunner and dog handler from the Camp Pendleton-based 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, died from his wounds that brutal day in early December.

The military considers them just another piece of equipment; they even have service numbers tattooed inside their ears. Soldiers often treat them as pets, playing with them and feeding them the junk food common on the remote bases of Afghanistan. To their handlers, bomb-sniffing dogs are more like battle buddies. "I'd trust Urmel over most people," Army Sgt. Tait Terzo said of his 4-year-old Belgian Malinois (service number: L-424). At the same time, he said, if a bomb is lethal, better it kills a dog than a human.