Roadside Bombs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

American military fatalities in Afghanistan doubled in 2009 compared with the previous year, and U.S. officials and analysts acknowledge that the new year is likely to prove even more lethal. The planned U.S. troop buildup and ever-deadlier tactics adopted by the Taliban and other insurgent groups are expected to result in at least a temporary surge in deaths and injuries among American troops. Nearly 70,000 are currently serving here and an additional 30,000 are to arrive in this year.

Twice a week, a caravan of trucks lumbers out of this volatile northwest Pakistan city in the dead of night and makes its way toward Afghanistan, loaded with one of the most coveted substances in a Taliban bombmaker's arsenal: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Every time the illicit caravan makes its trip, it moves unhindered past a gantlet of Pakistani police checkposts along the Pak-Afghan Highway. A string of bribes paid out to police, politicians and bureaucrats ensures that the smuggled explosive agent reaches its destination, middlemen on the Afghan side of the border who sell it to insurgents, says the co-owner of a Pakistani trucking firm that dispatches the caravans.

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.

A roadside bomb killed 22 people, many of them women and children, crammed into a minivan in western Afghanistan on Thursday, a grim reminder of the toll that the 10-year war against Taliban insurgents takes on civilians. The blast was one of two that struck civilians in the Owbeh district of the western province of Herat on Thursday morning. A separate roadside bomb killed an Afghan woman and injured seven people in a small Mazda truck, said Mohayuddin Noory, a spokesman for the Herat governor's office.

A roadside bomb killed 22 people - many of them women and children - crammed into a minivan in western Afghanistan on Thursday, a grim reminder of the toll that the 10-year war against Taliban insurgents takes on Afghan civilians. FOR THE RECORD: Afghanistan provinces: An earlier version of this online article misidentified the names of two Afghanistan provinces. Gardez is the capital of Afghanistan's Paktia province, not Paktika, and the Obeh district is in the province of Herat, not Heart.

A bomb planted by a road killed 15 Afghan civilians Saturday, including eight children, in a volatile southern district where American forces last year made a major push to dislodge the Taliban, provincial officials said. Arghandab district, just outside the south's main city of Kandahar, was the scene of heavy fighting in the summer and fall of 2010. Military progress in the south has been touted as a sign of the success of last year's U.S. troop surge, but insurgents in recent weeks have been filtering back into some key districts, seeking to reclaim former strongholds.

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.

For much of his life, Army Staff Sgt. Casey James Grochowiak chose the most adventurous path. As a high school student in north San Diego County, he liked surfing and snowboarding. As an infantryman, he jumped out of airplanes. And as an instructor at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, he showed soldiers how to catch a rattlesnake — with their bare hands if necessary. "He just loved to take chances," said his father, Edward Grochowiak, an attorney and architect who lives in Bonsall, near Oceanside.