IED 101: Roadside Bombs Often Camouflaged to Blend With Surroundings

The smallest clue can separate life and death for American troops in Afghanistan. Is that pile of rocks just rocks? Or is it a deadly booby-trap?

IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, represent one of the greatest threats to coalition forces in Afghanistan and have already claimed an estimated 300 American lives in nearly 1,000 attacks in the last year alone. In response, the U.S. military founded schools to train their soldiers to better spot and disarm IEDs.

The bombs are a constantly changing threat and can be disguised as "basically anything," U.S. Army Capt. Yarborough at an IED school in Kabul told "Good Morning America." So before they head out on the streets, American soldiers hit the classroom.

"It's hard to determine exactly how they're putting IEDs out and what they are using, so we have to constantly update what we do as far as the threat goes with IED," Yarborough said.

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In hangars filled with sand, dedicated to reconstructing the dirt paths of Afghanistan, troops are taught to look at nearly everything suspiciously, from piles of rocks to motorcycles or bikes.

"Anything they can use to make an explosive, they'll make it," Yarborough said.

Another school, known as Task Force Paladin at Bagram Air Force Base, was founded in 2007 in response to increasing IED attacks. There, Sgt. Blackmon teaches his trainees to be just as vigilant.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan has very few paved roads, which makes it easy for insurgents to bury IEDS. Troops are trained to look for certain indicators that may alert them to possible IEDS.

"If you're walking up a path every day and a farmer's using that same pathway as his donkey and now he's not using that path anymore, you've got to get your interpreter down to talk to that guy,'" Blackmon told the soldiers in July. "[Ask], 'Hey, why aren't you using this path anymore?' 'Well, the Taliban yesterday, they just buried anti-personnel mines up there.'"