Mannequins, fake funerals, booby-trapped bodies evolves in Ramadi

[leftchick]

http://www.kuwaittimes.net/Navariednews.asp?dismode=article&artid=1801835623

RAMADI: On an eerie, battle-scarred street in this blown-out urban war zone, a mannequin with painted black hair stares silently at US Marines hunkered down in sandbagged observation posts atop buildings a few blocks away. It's the latest insurgent ruse in an evolving war pitting the world's most powerful military against guerrilla fighters using their most effective weapon: ingenuity. Insurgents in Ramadi recently have flown kites over US troops to align mortar-fire, released pigeons to give away US troop movements and staged attacks at fake funeral processions complete with rocket-stuffed coffins, US forces deployed here say. "They're crafty, I'll give 'em that," said Marine Cpl John Strobridge as his Humvee passed the mannequin along one of the most bomb-infested roads in town, a street Americans call Route Michigan. "Gun it! Gun it!" he screamed to his driver as the vehicle crossed a frequently targeted intersection. The mannequin first popped up a few weeks ago in the courtyard of a secondary school near a collapsed building. The simple figure appears to be made of wood, with a white shirt and blue plants painted on. Two white arms hang down, carrying a briefcase.

"We kind of laugh at it. We don't know why they do it," Strobridge said. "But I think the idea is, we get used to looking at the mannequin, and then one day there's a real person standing there" with an AK-47 or a rocket launcher. Marines said there's no point stopping to take it down. The road is too dangerous, and such bizarre sites often are booby-trapped. At the bottom of a light pole beside another mannequin elsewhere in the city, the sleeve of an American MRE military ration package was found concealing a bomb. A Marine intelligence officer, who declined to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said insurgents had placed other booby-trapped mannequins on roadsides, hoping U.S. forces would believe they were corpses and stop to check on them. He said they had used the same trick with real corpses. In recent weeks, Marines found a human leg in the road with a pressure-switch bomb set to go off when it was picked up.

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