(Syria) Barrel bombs risk becoming answer to insurgency

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/article/Barrel-bombs-risk-becoming-answer-to-insurgency-5535600.php



This January 19, 2014, file photo provided by Aleppo Media Center (AMC), an anti-Bashar Assad activist group, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows Syrian citizens inspecting an unexploded barrel bomb filled with explosives, which was dropped from a Syrian forces helicopter on a street in Aleppo, Syria. The use of barrel bombs has spread this year from Syria to Iraq, raising concerns that desperate governments in a number of unstable nations from Europe to Africa to the Middle East will turn to weapons that the international community has condemned as a violation of human rights laws.

Barrel bombs risk becoming answer to insurgency
By LARA JAKES, AP National Security Writer : June 7, 2014 : Updated: June 7, 2014 4:16am

WASHINGTON (AP) — In desperate efforts to gain ground on battlefields, frustrated governments in the Mideast and Africa are using barrel bombs against their enemies — launching the cheap, quickly manufactured weapons as a crude counter to roadside blasts and suicide explosions that insurgents have deployed with deadly success for years.

New evidence that they are being used in Iraq after being dropped on civilian populations in Syria and Sudan has raised concerns that governments in a number of unstable nations will embrace them.

Described as "flying IEDs" — or improvised explosive devices — barrel bombs have the power to wipe out a row of buildings in a single blast and can kill large numbers of people, including unintended victims.

"It's fair to say that a lot of governments are losing control of the counterinsurgency," said Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They're also watching what they see in Syria, and they feel like their air power is what is making the difference."