FALLUJAH, 31 August 2005 — On a dusty road near the former rebel bastion of Fallujah, deep inside the restive Sunni heartland, a team of US military explosives experts sifts through the smoldering wreckage of a car. The air is thick with the acrid smell of burnt metal and rubber, as well as the stench of fried human flesh.

The blast occurred minutes earlier when a suicide car bomber detonated himself in a failed attempt to inflict casualties on a passing US convoy. “I’ve got his thumb, an index and a middle finger,” US Navy officer Todd Neal triumphantly announces to his colleagues. The body parts are placed in a clear plastic bag and then the examination continues. Neal’s team is the new face of the US-led coalition’s war on Iraq’s insurgents — a mixed US Navy and Marines response unit of Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) experts based at Camp Fallujah, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad. Roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), are currently the biggest killer for US-led forces in Iraq and the crudely made bombs have exacted a particularly heavy toll on US troops in recent months. On August 3, 14 Marines died when their heavily armored troop vehicle was completely destroyed by a roadside bomb blast close to the Syrian border in one of the deadliest single attacks against American forces in Iraq.

Whenever a roadside bomb is spotted or explodes, Neal and his colleagues come racing to defuse the ordnance or pick up the pieces for analysis, looking for vital clues, which could lead to the capture of a bomb-maker.

“We’re like the fire brigade, only different,” Neal says with a grin, stowing his collection of scrap metal and body parts in the back of a Humvee before leaving the site.

Back at headquarters, the team lays out what they found at the scene while their commander makes notes and takes pictures before compiling a report to be sent on to military intelligence counterparts and even the FBI.

In less than an hour, the EOD experts found enough crucial evidence littered around the blast site of around 100 square meters (1,075 square feet) to piece together how the bomb was made and establish a forensic profile of the bomber. The team found the bomber’s detonation switch and even his car keys.

“The push-button looks consistent with a lot of the ones we’ve seen lately,” said Lieutenant Cameron Chen, the unit commander, busily taking measurements of the shard metal to discover what type of ordnance was used.

Chen identifies minute differences in the color and dimension of the fragments and immediately accesses a computer database to narrow down the possibilities from lists of mortar and projectile-rocket shells. “They’ve used a 122-millimetre Russian OF56 and a 120-millimetre Chinese mortar,” he eventually concludes.

Iraq’s insurgency is greatly facilitated by vast amounts of grenades, rockets and mortar shells stashed around the country — a legacy of Saddam Hussein’s huge military spending in the years before the 2003 US-led invasion.

After significant losses to IEDs, the US military is placing an increasingly strong emphasis on the work of its EOD teams to track down insurgents using ordnance to such an unorthodox but deadly effect. Chen said around 50 EOD experts — many are naval officers like himself — operate in the restive Sunni Anbar province, whose principal towns Fallujah and Ramadi are, with Baghdad, the top three hotspots for roadside bomb attacks.

EOD traineeships had doubled since the war ended, Chen said, but added that EOD experts from the US Navy had vital experience after years of clearing underwater mines and working with special operations teams like the navy SEALS.

In recent weeks, US officials have publicly noted an apparent increase in size and sophistication of roadside bombs, claiming that Iraqi rebels are receiving weaponry assistance from Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah, with the compliance of Tehran. “There’s always a concern that IEDs are becoming more technically advanced,” said Chen. Although Chen refused to divulge the particular trends his team had identified, he said the reports were sent to an American-led agency in Baghdad composed of specialists from the FBI, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and experts from Britain and Australia. “The goal is to tie a bomb-maker to a scene from their style,” Chen said, but he added that expanding EOD expertise was not the key to US success in Iraq.

“We’re really dealing with the symptoms of a wider problem... it’s like we’re trying to stop the tide.”