Forensics Team Provides Insight On Iraq's Insurgency

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18, 2005 — -- Inside a small building at the main U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad, sits a forensics lab where evidence is gathered from the thousands of bombs that insurgents have planted in Iraq.

With only 20 people assigned to the lab, it is an overwhelming responsibility to collect and examine the remote-controlled toys, walkie-talkies and cordless phones that insurgents have used to kill American troops and the Iraqis who help them.

"I've done more bombing investigations in 3½ weeks than I have in 17 years as an ATF agent," said Ken Chisolm, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who works in the lab.

The volume of material is enormous, and so is the danger. In Iraq, at least 155 people have died in bombings since Friday, and militants have attempted nearly 4,000 bombings since the fall of Baghdad.

When teams go to collect evidence, a second bomb often awaits them. If the device is found before it explodes, a robot blows it up to avoid accidental detonation, but it also destroys much of the evidence.

Nevertheless, the teams have managed to gather some alarming evidence.

"We've never seen anything like this in history," said Gaghan. "The volume and then the sophistication is something that we haven't seen."

In just two short years, the insurgents have gone from using remote-controlled toys to detonate bombs -- easy to operate, but not very precise -- to far more complicated detonators with much greater killing power.

"Some of these models come up with 13 or more handsets," Gaghan said. "So you could actually, with one purchase, get 13 different bombs."