Bomb destroys MRAP vehicle

Soldier is killed on Iraq patrol in armored vehicle

The new vehicles are much bigger than Humvees, standing 12 feet tall; weighing up to 18 tons; carrying six to 10 soldiers, depending on the model; and costing an average of $500,000 apiece and up to $1 million. There are more than 1,500 of them in Iraq, and the military plans to buy more than 20,000 of them at a total cost of more than $10 billion.

Saturday's deadly attack came on the first day of an operation to clear insurgents from southern Arab Jabour, a rural, overwhelmingly Sunni area less than 10 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The primary target is al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, the homegrown extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign-led.

The bomb went off at 4:45 p.m., as engineers were driving beside an irrigation ditch to support soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, who had been clearing farmhouses and villages since a dawn air assault. The blast threw the vehicle into the air and spun it 180 degrees, with its shattered nose coming to rest beside the ditch.

Several vehicles in the convoy had already passed over the same spot but failed to trigger what officers believe was a deeply buried homemade bomb, which the military calls an improvised explosive device, or IED, made from about 300 pounds of fertilizer and triggered with a pressure device.

Infantrymen who had spent the day carefully maneuvering on foot through fields and ditches heard the blast and saw the smoke.

"That was another IED," said Capt. John Newman, the commander of Company B, to groans from his men who had walked close to the blast site earlier that morning.

Two minutes later came another report. "It was an MRAP, totally destroyed," said the radio operator.

Two rescue helicopters arrived minutes later to evacuate the wounded.

Dismayed, their colleagues carried on with their patrols, detaining insurgent suspects and searching for other bombs in farmyards and vehicles.