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Marines Make a New Door for House with Suspected IED Inside
Published 2 years ago
Marines clearing abandoned homes that the Taliban were using as fighting positions make the decision to create a new door into a house that they suspect has an IED inside.
A common tactic for the Taliban in Afghanistan was to set up improvised explosive devices in their fighting positions before they would abandon them. They knew that the Marines and Soldiers in the area would engage them, and then maneuver onto their positions, so initially this was a very easy way to cause casualties to aggressive American forces. Early on, it was especially easy because the Marines and Soldiers were hesitant to just blow a house up, because they had no idea if civilians occupied the house when the Taliban weren't using it as a fighting position to ambush them from.
After a while, to combat this tactic, Marines and Soldiers started searching every former Taliban fighting position very thoroughly, and if a suspected IED was found, explosives would be used to either drop the entire building, or create a new entryway into the compound. That's what you're looking at in this video. An evolution of a counter-IED tactics as it specifically applied to the war in Afghanistan.
Even still, after a new entryway into the compound was created, each compound would be extensively searched with combat mine detectors and by the individual eyeballs of each Marine or Soldier. Often, Marines and Soldiers would use the same marked paths inside of these houses to avoid stepping on smaller IEDs that had been placed to attrite the Marines and Soldiers as they reoccupied these positions for their own use in continued engagements with the Taliban in the immediate area.
