Yet another home-made bomb attack in Iraq's "triangle of death". These bombs are the biggest killer Latifiyah Iraq, and insurgents have enough explosives to keep going for years, say US marines. This latest attack, a couple of hundred metres (yards) from a bridge hit so many times troops call it IED Bridge, was a variant known in army-speak as a SVBIED, or suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
Only the bomber died, his body blown to mostly unrecognisable bits. His target, Iraqi National Guards at the checkpoint in the town of Latifiyah, escaped unharmed, but four civilians were slightly wounded. "Mortars and IEDs are the primary causes of our casualties," said Captain David Nevers, a marine spokesman. The insurgents "don't have an army; they can't fight us that way."
The insurgents did fight "that way" in the towns of Fallujah and Mosul in November when US-led forces moved in to regain government control ahead of elections planned for January 30.
But in this region just south of Baghdad, dubbed the "triangle of death" because of the frequent kidnappings and deadly attacks that take place here, they rarely do. Roadside bomb attacks are the favoured weapon. "It's in my mind all the time. You try to be aware of everything on the road, you keep moving your eyes," said Lance Corporal Daniel Sanatore, a driver of a seven-tonne truck who carries a piece of shrapnel in his pocket from the IED attack he survived near the town of Abu Ghraib.
The bomb that hit his truck was hidden in some trash by the side of the road. Often they are buried in the gravel on the edge of the route. Roadside bomb attacks on convoys are so frequent that the authorities have closed a stretch of Iraq's main north-south highway that runs through here and set up marine positions under most of the bridges.
Insurgents mostly use artillery shells hooked up to remote detonating devices such as cordless telephones, said Gunnery Sergeant Jose Soto, the head of a three-man team that gets called out daily to defuse IEDs.
When a convoy is moving past, all the bomber has to do is to make a call to the number of the phone.
Trip wires stretched across the road are in increasingly popular way to detonate the devices, said Soto. "We think they've got enough (explosives) to go for quite a while," he said. "But I think they'll run out of bombers before they run out of supplies."The "triangle of death" was at the heart of Saddam Hussein's military-industrial complex, and the munitions factories here were looted in the chaos that followed the US-led invasion to oust him last year. The marines find weapons caches almost every day.
Captain Nevers listed the following in one unusually large cache discovered this week - 500 artillery fuses, 12 fragmentation grenades, 127 82 mm mortar rounds, one complete 82mm mortar system, two bags of propellant, 13 155mm artillery shells with C4 explosive added and 75 metres of detonator cord.
"I think we've made a dent but I don't think anybody presumes that we're about to exhaust their supply (of bomb-making material)," said Nevers.