From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

the insurgency apparently found it increasingly difficult to recruit suicide bombers, remote-controlled IEDs gained importance as the weapon of choice. When the United States counteracted with electronic jammers, the insurgents adapted by reverting to hard-to-jam signals.

Now they’ve gone back to basics—the hardest to counteract and the simplest of all to use—strapping bombs to unwitting others, including dogs, cows, donkeys, and human beings with Down syndrome.

Usually a dog is picked off the streets, rigged with explosives, and then set loose among potential victims. The bomb is then detonated by remote control. In Ramadi insurgents booby-trapped a donkey and then let it loose near a US-run checkpoint, where the donkey exploded. In Al Mashro police “arrested” a cow wandering down a highway dressed in bombs.

The new method became so popular that the daily Arabic-language newspaper Al Mada published an editorial cartoon showing an insurgent trying to give a pep talk to a terrified dog: “It is such a simple task. All you have to do is to put on this explosives belt, repeat the party’s slogans, and may Allah have mercy on your father’s soul!”

But the insurgents in Iraq held no corner on using animals as weapons during war. That distinction probably belongs to Americans, who through the years have used dogs to deliver messages and supplies through dangerous areas, cats to kill rats in foxholes, birds to indicate chemical weapons, and dolphins and seals to spot sea mines. During World War II the Soviet and US armies reportedly trained “tank dogs” who were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born and fed only underneath tanks. When the dogs grew older, they were starved, rigged with bombs, and then sent out onto the battlefield to search for the nearest tank, hopefully a German one. Once there, the bombs were detonated.

The beauty of using animals to kill is that they don’t know any better. Soldiers, Marines, insurgents all had to be trained to kill, which took up time and resources, whereas donkeys and dogs just wanted someone to pet or feed them. The problem with this method, however, is that it is fairly imprecise. After all, you can’t direct a cow to “go up to the corner, turn left, walk north for two blocks, and then moo loudly when you get to the line of guys standing outside the police recruiting station.”

So they reverted to something even better—people like nineteen-year-old Amar, who had Down syndrome. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Amar’s parents went out to vote and then went to a relative’s house for a celebratory party. While they were gone, insurgents kidnapped Amar, strapped a bomb to him, and told him to walk toward a polling site.

At least one eyewitness said that Amar “was so scared when ordered to walk to the searching point, he began to walk back to the terrorists.”

In response, they blew him up.

Amar’s parents heard the blast from their party, and when word spread that a “mongoli” was the bomber, they raced home to find Amar gone. Amar’s cousin told the Sydney Morning Herald: “They got neighbors to search and one of them identified Amar’s head where it lay on the pavement. His body was broken into pieces. I have heard of them using dead people and donkeys and dogs to hide their bombs, but how could they do this to a boy like Amar?”

I don’t care how long you’ve been in Iraq, that sort of thing kicks your ass to the curb and back.

It hits me suddenly, like a slap on the back in a crowded room—a major in the army had gotten puppies out of the country some time back. I can’t remember the details, because at the time it was just something I heard about, like you’d hear about someone’s wife back home having a baby, a nice story in passing but something you think about for a few minutes and then forget. All I remember now is that someone in the State Department had helped her.

I e-mail the major and explain Lava’s story.

“Did you actually get your pooches vaccinated?” I write:

More importantly, if I could hook up Anne Garrels with your friend at State, do you think he’d help one more time? It would be such a huge favor to ask, I know, but I’m leaving in less than two months—Annie leaves at the end of this month—and I’m running out of ideas. We’ve even considered asking the Marine C-130 crews to take him with them. I’d have to put him in a kit bag, get on a helo to Al Asad, then give him to them to take home . . .

The problem is that I still don’t have permission to transport Lava on a military plane, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to. In addition, Lava still doesn’t have his vaccinations or paperwork and I haven’t heard back from Dr. Murrani.

Anyway, if you think you could ask your friend to help once more, I’d appreciate it tremendously.

I’m banking on the fact that the major has been in Iraq for a while and hopefully understands the need for mutual rowing.

She does. She writes back immediately telling me first that she heard a car bomb went off in front of the ISAW in Baghdad, which is probably why I haven’t heard back from Dr. Murrani yet; she likely has other issues to deal with.

I got the dogs vaccinated by a military vet. He was very paranoid about it though, and had me meet him in a parking lot in civilian clothes to hand off the records.

[My friend] at State Department claimed [the puppies] as his and had them shipped to Kuwait. From there, Bonnie Buckley at Military Mascots had a very nice lady pick them up and ship them to Atlanta via Amsterdam.

I found the key is to get an Iraqi vet to get them all the shots—rabies most importantly, or get a friend to convoy them to Kuwait and get one of Bonnie’s contacts to