US military deaths by IEDs increase in Afghanistan: report
 

US military deaths by IEDs increase in Afghanistan: report
BY OLIVIA BEAVERS - 10/22/17 02:38 PM EDT
RE: http://thehill.com/homenews/administ...anistan-report

The number of U.S. service personnel killed as a result of improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan is rising, Foreign Policy reported Friday.

From the beginning of April to the end of June of this year, IEDs killed or injured 3,043 people in 1,143 separate incidents in Afghanistan, according to internal slides obtained from the Department of Defense by FP.

When compared to the previous 90 days, the numbers from the nearly-three-month-long period show an 8-percent increase in IED incidents as well as a 39-percent uptick in attacks that resulted in death and injury.
The numbers are also a 17-percent increase when compared to the same period in 2016, according to the report.

The Pentagon's bomb-combatting agency, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization (JIDO), produced the report. While it used open-source reporting for its analysis, the document was marked for Official Use Only, FP reported.

A spokeswoman for JIDO told Foreign Policy in an email that the agency typically will release unclassified documents a few months after they are reviewed. She did not immediately respond to the outlet's request for comment about the statistics.

IEDs have long been a weapon used by terrorist organizations in their battles.

Afghanistan was the only country in Central Command to see an increase in both incidents and casualties from IEDs compared to the previous 90 days, the JIDO report says. Iraq in the same period saw 15 percent fewer incidents and 30 percent fewer casualties than it had in the previous 90 days.

Anthony Cordesman, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told FP that IEDs gives the Taliban “visibility, power, and influence," adding that the insurgents may use the weapon more frequently as they lose ground controlling cities in the war-torn state.

President Trump is expected to send an additional 4,000 troops to Afghanistan, where there were 11,000 troops are stationed in the state at the end of August, according to the Pentagon.