car bomb

A car bomb is an improvised explosive device that is placed in a car or other vehicle and then exploded. It is commonly used as a weapon of assassination, terrorism, or guerrilla warfare, to kill the occupant(s) of the vehicle and people near the blast site and/or to cause damage to buildings or other property. Car bombs act as their own delivery mechanisms and can carry a relatively large amount of explosives without attracting suspicion.

The U.S. military and law enforcement agencies often call a car bomb a "VBIED", an acronym standing for "Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device", or "SVBIED" if it is a suicide attack.

Usage

The earliest car bombs were intended for assassination. These were often wired to the car's ignition system, to explode when the car was started. Ignition triggering is now rare, as it is easy to detect and hard to install — interfering with the circuitry is time-consuming and car alarms can be triggered by drains on the car's electrical system. Also, the target can start the car remotely (inadvertently or otherwise), or the target may be a passenger who is a safe distance away when the ignition starts.

It is now more common for assassination bombs to be affixed to the underside of the car and then detonated remotely, by the car's motion, or by other means. The bomb is exploded as the target approaches or starts the vehicle or, more commonly, after the vehicle begins to move, when the target is more likely to be inside. For this reason, guards often check the underside of vehicles with a long mirror mounted on a pole.

In recent years, car bombs have become widely used by suicide bombers who seek to ram the car into a building and simultaneously detonate it.

Countermeasures

Defending against a car bomb involves keeping vehicles at a distance from vulnerable targets, often using Jersey barriers, concrete blocks or bollards, and hardening buildings to withstand an explosion. Since the height of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) campaign, the entrance to Downing Street has been closed, preventing the general public from getting near Number 10. This can be difficult where public roads pass near buildings, and road closures may be the only option in such circumstances (hence, for instance, in Washington, D.C. Pennsylvania Avenue is closed to traffic immediately behind the White House).

History

The origin of the car bomb could be traced back to the one used for the assassination attempt on Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1905 in Constantinople.

In the past, groups to use car bombs included:

• September 1920 in New York, Italian anarchist Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives and shrapnel near the corner of Wall and Broad streets, directly across from J P Morgan Company. Forty killed, 200 wounded.

Vietcong terror car bombing aftermath scene in Saigon, 1965.

Car bomb in Iraq, made from a number of concealed artillery shells in the back of a pickup truck.

A 2005 car bombing in Iraq in which a second car bomb was detonated while Coalition forces were investigating the scene of an earlier such blast, causing 18 casualties.

BATF summary table illustrating the size and range of effectiveness of car bombs by vehicle type used

• The Stern Gang, on January 12, 1947, drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing four and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well.
• The British deserters in the pay of Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al Husseini to attack Jewish targets in Palestine;
• The Viet Cong guerrillas at the end of the First Indochina War and through the Vietnam War;
• The OAS at the end of the French rule in Algeria;
• The Sicilian Mafia used them to assassinate independent magistrates in the early 1960s;
• The IRA (and its splinter groups) used them frequently during its campaign during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The IRA used mercury tilt switches in the majority of their car bombs. IRA carbombings usually caused little or no deaths as warnings were almost always issued to the British Army, however sometimes these warnings gave insufficient evacuation time and resulted in civilian casualties. (See: Bloody Friday (1972)
• British terrorist organisations such as the UVF and UDA often used carbombings against Irish civilians in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The worst terrorist atrocity in the 30 year Northern Irish Conflict occurred when the UVF detonated carbombs in Dublin and Monaghan. (see: Dublin and Monaghan bombings)
• Timothy McVeigh, American white-power terrorist, drove a Ryder truck filled with fuel oil and fertilizer up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on April 19, 1995

Mass casualty car bombing, and especially suicide car bombing, is currently a predominantly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The tactic was widely used in the Lebanese Civil War by the Islamic fundamentalist group Hezbollah. The most notable car bombing was the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing which killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French. In the Lebanese civil war, one estimate says that 3,641 car bombs were detonated.^[1]

Groups that still use car bombs include:

• Palestinian militant groups against both military and civilian Israeli targets.
• Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka's long-running civil war.
• Al-Qaeda
• The Iraqi insurgency. Car bombs have become frequent during the Iraq War. An estimated 578 car bombs were detonated in Iraq between June 2003 and June 2006^[2].

References

1. ^ http://www.cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1835&page=0
2. ^ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f141b23e-f86a-11db-a940-000b5df10621.html

See also

• List of mass car bombings

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Car bombs

• A Video of a detected car bomb (VBIED) going off
• A history of the car bomb (Asia Times)
• Explosive reading, review by Daniel Swift for the Financial Times

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