The buildings are actually disguised warehouses full of munitions — mortar shells, artillery rounds, anti-tank missiles and more — thousands of pieces of military ordnance that are completely unguarded more than two weeks after the fall of the capital.
Barrel bombs, rockets and mortars along with conventional munition have destroyed 80% of the buildings, and of the old city's 100 mosques, a quarter lie in ruins while the rest are badly damaged.
A deputy defense minister in Poland said an enemy mortar that hit a munitions dump on Tuesday killed six Eastern European soldiers under Polish command who were defusing mines.
The psychic wounds inflicted on 1.5 million terrified Palestinian civilians subjected to 1,000 and 2,000 lb bombs, 155mm artillery shells, cluster munitions, heavy mortar fire, air to ground missiles, white phosphorus, and high-velocity tank shells cannot be described.
Along much of the route, Iraqi forces had dug holes every couple of hundred yards in which they'd piled grenades, mortars and other munitions.
In April, South African stevedores refused to unload a shipment of seventy-seven tons of rockets, mortars, and other munitions from China destined for Zimbabwe — a cargo reminiscent of the deliveries to Rwanda before the genocide of 1994.
They included old mortar shells and other military munitions bundled together, said Gen. Hussein Yassin, the Najaf police chief, and were ignited by remote control.
There, in 1993, the U.S. military disinterred 144 pieces of World War I-era munitions, including unexploded mortar rounds: the remains of the government's chemical effort to fight fire with fire against the Germans.
Yet Mr Scarlett revealed to the inquiry that the "45-minute" claim referred to "munitions, which we interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles".
This was Iwo Jima, a tiny speck 600 miles south of Tokyo, whose central features were two airstrips, a narrow two miles of beaches and Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano whose core and surface became a rabbit warren for munitions storage, artillery and mortar points, hospitals and living accommodations for 22,000 defenders.
Some of the attackers used older Russian military munitions, including bombs, artillery shells, mortar rounds and grenades dating back to the Soviet era.
