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Dogs have been involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts since the start; pooches are NATO’s best bomb detectors, for instance. But the canines are taking on new wartimes roles – as paratroopers in Afghanistan and as improvised explosive devices in Iraq.
Members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) special forces have begun parachuting into enemy strongholds in Afghanistan with Taliban-seeking German shepherds strapped to their chests. Once on the ground, the dogs hunt for Taliban insurgents in buildings and — with cameras strapped to their heads sending back video — act as forward scouts for the British special forces unit. The work is every bit as dangerous for the dogs as it is for their human counterparts, The Guardian reports. Eight SAS paratrooper pups killed in combat thus far.
Though the missions are officially secret, earlier reports of the pups’ training shed some light on how the British special forces are likely using them. SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. The SAS dogs are trained to jump tethered to their handlers from heights as high as 25,000 feet and up to 20 miles away — or a 30 minute glide — from a target location. At that height, the lack of oxygen puts them at risk for hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, so the dogs are fitted with special masks to give them breathable air. The Brits reportedly borrowed the tactic from America’s super-secret Delta Force, which first trained dogs to make HAHO jumps.
For their part, Iraqi insurgents may have also developed a new way to use dogs as weapons, albeit in a more gruesome fashion.
A French newspaper is reporting that two years ago al-Qaeda in Iraq surgically implanted two stray dogs with explosives in an attempt to blow up a Los Angeles-bound cargo plane while it was in mid-flight. Not surprisingly, amateur surgery to cram explosives into living mammals can cause some serious complications, both for the patient’s health and its future terrorist intentions. The plot failed because the dogs died from the effects of surgery and were thus never loaded on board.
It’s important to remember that as authorities grow concerned about hidden explosive devices developed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and rumors circulate about surgically-implanted breast and butt bombs. If the al-Qaeda in Iraq dogs plot was the animal trial for implant bombs in humans, the method may be dead on arrival.
Photo: Austrian Armed Forces
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