Dogs & donkeys carry bombs

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

BAGHDAD–“Even the most virulent clerical opponents of the
U.S. presence in Iraq have decried the use of canines as proxies in
the war,” Los Angeles Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi reported
from Baghdad in August 2005, after several incidents in which
insurgents used dogs to carry bombs.
“Our religion does not permit us to hurt animals, either by
using them as explosive devices, or in any other manner,” Muslim
Scholars Association spokesperson Abdel Salam Kubaisi told Daragahi.
Daragahi described the MSA as “a hard-line Sunni Arab
clerical organization sympathetic to insurgents.”
The bombings by dog reportedly occurred in Latifiya, south of
Baghdad; in Baqubah, in central Iraq; and in and around the
northern city of Kirkuk. Neither the Sunnis nor the Shi’ites seemed
eager to claim the bombings.

“The daily newspaper Al Mada recently published an editorial
cartoon showing an insurgent who strongly resembled [deposed
dictator] Saddam Hussein trying to persuade a dog to strap on a belt
bomb to advance the cause of the Baath Party, which once ruled
Iraq,” Daragahi wrote.
“It is such a simple task,” the insurgent tells the
terrified dog. “All you have to do is to put on this explosives
belt, repeat the party’s slogans, and may Allah have mercy on your
father’s soul!”
A donkey was used to carry a bomb to attack Israelis near
Palestinian territory in 2003, prompting PETA to protest to the late
Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. After the bombings by dog in Iraq,
a donkey in December 2005 carried a land mine close to a German aid
agency vehicle in the northern Afghanistan city of Faizabad. That
bomb only killed the donkey.
The isolated nature of the incidents, their timing, and
their geography make possible that a single terrorist might have been
responsible for all of them, wandering from one theatre of jihad to
another.