Robo-bomber flies into Iraq

PILOTED from 7,000 miles away in Nevada, the United States air force is about to deploy the world's first dedicated robot attack squadron to Iraq, a watershed moment even in a conflict that has seen many innovative ways to hunt and kill.

The Reaper, a new generation Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300mph and reach 50,000 feet.

It is fitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The moment the Reaper goes into active service is expected "soon," said the regional US air commander, Lieutenant-General Gary North.

The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior air force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this autumn and next spring. They look forward to it.

The US air force is building a 400,000sq ft expansion of a concrete-ramp area now used for existing Predator UAV drones at Balad, the biggest US air base in Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad.

It is another sign that the air force is planning for an extended stay in Iraq, supporting Iraqi government forces in any continuing conflict, even if US ground troops are withdrawn in the coming years.

An estimated two-dozen or more unmanned MQ-1 Predators are now carrying out surveillance over Iraq, as the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron has become a mainstay of the US war effort.

They offer round-the-clock airborne "eyes" watching over road convoys, tracking night-time insurgent movements via infrared sensors, and occasionally unleashing one of their two Hellfire missiles on a target.

The MQ-9 Reaper, when compared with the 1995-vintage Predator, represents a major evolution of UAV.

At five tons, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator. Its size - 36ft long, with a 66ft wingspan - is comparable to the profile of the US air force's workhorse A-10 attack plane. It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most significantly, it carries many more weapons.

While the Predator is armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons - or four Hellfires and two 500lb bombs.

"It's not a recon squadron," Colonel Joe Guasella, operations chief for the central command's air operations, said of the Reapers. "It's an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability."

"Kinetic" - Pentagon jargon for destructive power - is what the US air force had in mind when it christened its newest robot plane with a name associated with death.

The air force's 432nd Wing, a UAV unit established on 1 May, is to eventually fly 60 Reapers and 160 Predators. The numbers to be assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan will be classified.

The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is - by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer stations and video screens that display what the UAV "sees". Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the take-offs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada's Creech air force base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape.

American ground troops, equipped with laptops that can download real-time video from UAVs overhead, "want more and more of it," said Major Chris Snodgrass, the squadron commander in charge of Predators at the Balad base.

The Reaper's velocity will help. "Our problem is speed," Major Snodgrass said of the 140mph Predator.

"If there are troops in contact, we may not get there fast enough. The Reaper will be faster and fly farther."

The new robot plane is expected to be able to stay aloft for 14 hours fully armed, watching an area and waiting for targets to emerge.

"It's going to bring us flexibility, range, speed and persistence," said Gen North, "such that I will be able to work lots of areas for a long, long time."

The British are also impressed with the Reaper, and are buying three for deployment in Afghanistan later this year. The Royal Air Force version will stick to the "recon" mission, however - with no weapons on board.

85 DIE IN CITY BLAST

AT LEAST 85 people were killed yesterday by a suicide lorry bomb in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, some of them trapped on a bus where they burned to death.

Police also said 180 people were wounded in a blast that heightened tension in the oil-producing northern city, shared by Kurds, Turkmen, Shiite and Sunni Arabs. The city plans to hold a crucial referendum later this year on its future status.

"Houses and shops were destroyed by the explosion," said General Torhan Abdul Rahman, the city's deputy chief of police.

US and Iraqi military operations in and around Baghdad have reduced the number of particularly big attacks in the capital in recent weeks. But violence has flared elsewhere in the country, where security forces are more thinly spread.

Kurds want Kirkuk to join the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan but many other residents prefer that it remain under the wing of the central government in Baghdad.

Police said there may be more bodies buried in rubble. The bomb detonated minutes apart from a car bomb in a busy Kirkuk shopping area that wounded two people, police said.

A police officer was killed and four officers were wounded soon after, when a parked car bomb exploded in southern Kirkuk, police said. A fourth car bomb was discovered and made safe.