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A car bomb is an explosive device 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, people near the blast site, or to damage 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 used in a suicide attack.

Usage

Assassination

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 may start the car remotely (inadvertently or otherwise), or the target may be a passenger a safe distance away when the car starts.

It is now more common for assassination bombs to be affixed to the underside of the car 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, security guards often check the underside of vehicles with a long mirror mounted on a pole.

Attacks

The effectiveness of a car bomb is that an explosion detonated inside a car is momentarily contained. If the force of the explosion were to double each fraction of a second and the car were to contain the explosion for one second before its chassis gave way, this would result in a much greater force than if the detonation took place outside the car. Therefore a greater amount of damage is obtained from a given amount of explosive.

Suicide bombing

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 by using Jersey barriers, concrete blocks or bollards, or by 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. Where major public roads pass near buildings, road closures may be the only option (thus, for instance, in Washington, D.C. the portion of Pennsylvania Avenue immediately behind the White House) is closed to traffic). Historically these tactics have encouraged potential bombers to target "soft" or unprotected targets, such as markets. The U.S. State Department has published a guide on car bomb awareness.

History

It may be the first car bomb was the one used for the assassination attempt on Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1905 in İstanbul by Armenian separatists, in the command of Belgian anarchist Edward Jorris.

In the past, groups to use car bombs included:

• In 1920, when Italian anarchist Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives and shrapnel near the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York City, directly across from J P Morgan Company. The explosion killed 40 and wounded 200.

• In 1927, Andrew Kehoe used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside a school. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others. In total, Kehoe killed 45 people and injured 58 making the Bath School disaster the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history.

• In the late 1940s, the radical-Zionist Stern gang used car and truck bombs against Palestinian and British targets as an attempt to end peace discussions;
• The Viet Cong guerrillas used them at the end of the First Indochina War and throughout the Vietnam War;
• The OAS used them 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.
• Loyalist paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association used car bombs against civilians in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The events with the most casulties in the Troubles occurred when the UVF detonated car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan.
• During the Soviet-Afghan war, at a variety of training camps in the tribal areas of Pakistan;, the Pakistani ISI with the aid of the CIA trained mujahadin in the preparation of car bombs
• Agents of the Chilean intelligence agency DINA were convicted of using car booms to assassinate Orlando Letelier and Carlos Prats, who were opponents of the regime of Augusto Pinochet
• In the 1980s, the Latin American drug lord Pablo Escobar used vehicle bombs extensively against government forces and population centers in Latin America;
• In 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a Ryder box truck filled with an explosive mixture (fuel oil and fertilizer) in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (see Oklahoma City bombing)
• In the late 1990s and early 2000s, vehicular explosives were used by Chechen extremists against targets in Russia

Mass-casualty car bombing, and especially suicide car bombing, is currently a predominantly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The tactic was first introduced to the region by the Stern gang, who used it extensively against Palestinian and British targets; it was subsequently taken up by Palestinian bombers as well.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 military personnel. In the Lebanese civil war, an estimated 3,641 car bombs were detonated.

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 (see esp. 1998 United States embassy bombings)
• The Iraqi insurgency. Car bombs have become more frequent during the Iraq War. An estimated 578 car bombs were detonated in Iraq between June 2003 and June 2006.

See also

• Improvised explosive device#Car Bomb/Vehicle-borne IEDs
• List of mass car bombings
• Category:Deaths by car bomb

Notes

1. See Davis.
2. "Terrorist Tactics: When broken down vehicles go boom!", U.S. State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security, December 2005
3. Davis, ch. 13, "Car-Bomb University"
4. Davis, chapter 4, "Oranges for Jaffa".
5. The Atlas Group and Walid Raad - Cornerhouse
6. FT.com / Arts & weekend / Books - Explosive reading

References

• Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso: New York, 2007).

External links

• 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

• Terrorism tactics
• Car bombs
• Suicide weapons
• Improvised explosive devices