Animal-borne bomb attacks

Animal-borne bomb attacks are the use of animals as delivery systems for explosives. The explosives are strapped to a pack animal such as a horse, mule or donkey. The pack animal may be set off in a crowd.

Projects of bat bombs and pigeon bomb have also been studied.

In 2009, the Taliban strapped an improvised explosive device to a donkey. The gate guard noticed something suspicious when a group of men let the donkey go a short way from the camp and then hurried off. The donkey was stopped with a rifle shot. One soldier set fire to the hay with a flare provoking a "considerable explosion".

In April 2013, in Kabul, a bomb attached to a donkey blew up in front of a police security post, killing a policeman and wounding three civilians. A government spokesman claimed insurgents were challenging the competence of the Afghan government prior to the 2014 withdrawal of the U.S. military.

On 21 November 2003, eight rockets were fired from donkey carts at the Iraqi oil ministry and two hotels in downtown Baghdad, injuring one man and causing some damage. In 2004 a donkey in Ramadi was loaded with explosives and set off towards a US-run checkpoint. It exploded before it was able to injure or kill anyone. The incident, along with a number of similar incidents involving dogs, fueled fears of terrorist practices of using living animals as weapons, a change from an older practice of using the bodies of dead animals to hold explosives. The use of improvised explosive devices concealed in animal's carcasses was also a common practice among the Iraqi Insurgency.

Malia Sufangi, a young Lebanese woman, was caught in the Security Zone in November 1985 with an explosive device mounted on a donkey with which she had failed to carry out an attack. She claimed that she had been recruited and dispatched by Syrian Brigadier-General Ghazi Kanaan who supplied the explosives and instructions on how the attack was to be carried out from his headquarters in the town of Anjer in the Bekaa Valley.

In 1862, during the New Mexico Campaign of the American Civil War a Confederate force approached the ford at Valverde, six miles north of Fort Craig, hoping to cut Union communications between the fort and their headquarters in Santa Fe. About midnight, Union Captain James Craydon tried to blow up a few rebel picket posts by sending mules loaded with barrels of fused gunpowder into the Confederate lines, but the faithful old army mules insisted on wandering back toward the Union camp before blowing to bits. Although the only casualties were two mules, the explosions stampeded a herd of Confederate beef cattle and horses into the Union's lines, so depriving the Confederate troops of some much-needed provisions and horses.

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