Counterterrorism Blog

"Asia Times Online" has a two-part series, "A History of the Car Bomb," by American author Mike Davis, in the April 13 and April 18 editions. It's a fascinating history of the car bomb from its first use in September 1920 in New York by Mario Buda, a comrade of famous anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, through its recent use by Islamic terrorists. Mr. Davis appears unbiased; he will make some uncomfortable in his discussion of its past use by forces now allied with the United States against those Islamic terrorists who use the car bomb today against us. I don't know whether it's new or whether these parts are excerpts from a book, but I recommend it and look forward to readers' comments. I'll update this post if they run other segments. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has a good article on the car bomb with a table of mass car bombing events. An excerpt from the "Asia Time Online" series :

"Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947, when the Stern Gang 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: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically - producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962) and Palermo (1963) - but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional Irish Republican Army accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to air power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities."

"Zarqawi, it is claimed, is pursuing an essentially eschatological rather than political goal: a cleansing of enemies without end until the Earth is ruled by a single, righteous caliphate.

Toward this end, he - or those invoking his name - seems to have access to an almost limitless supply of bomb vehicles (some of them apparently stolen in California and Texas, then shipped to the Middle East) as well as Saudi and other volunteers eager to martyr themselves in flame and molten metal for the sake of taking a few Shi'ite school kids, market venders or foreign "crusaders" with them....

But Zarqawi did not originate car bomb terrorism along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; that dark honor belongs to the CIA and its favorite son, Iyad Allawi...According to one of the Times' informants, the bombing campaign, dead school kids and all, 'was a test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability'. It allowed the CIA to portray the then-exiled Allawi and his suspect group of ex-Ba'athists as a serious opposition to Saddam and an alternative to the coterie (so favored by Washington neo-conservatives) around Ahmad Chalabi. 'No one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then,' another CIA veteran reflected. 'I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn out today.'..."