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As noted in a recent posting, I received a behind-the-scenes look at the Canadian War Museum’s storage facilities/vaults as specialists there prepare for reworking exhibit areas at the museum.

The concluding area of Gallery 4: From the Cold War to the Presentis being redeveloped to explore Canadian involvement in operations in the Gulf War, Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. New artifacts, eyewitness testimonies and artwork connected to individual stories will highlight how these missions have affected Canada and the world, according to war museum officials.

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The updates to Gallery 4 will be ready in September but for now a specific opening date has yet to be set.

In the meantime, I’ll be publishing a number of photos I took of the new exhibits that are to be displayed. Eric Fernberg and Andrew Burtch of the war museum have provided the details about the items.

Today Defence Watch features components that were used by insurgents in Afghanistan to build improvised explosive devices. This is a display of a variety of actual IED components recovered by Canadian combat engineers in Kandahar. They were loaned to the CWM by DND’s Directorate of History and Heritage from their collection of artifacts from the Afghanistan War. The components include examples of triggers, housing for explosives, and shrapnel from explosives. All components recovered were sent for forensic analysis in an effort to identify the bomb-makers. The parts look simple, and in many cases they are such as the containers and pots shown below that contained the explosives or the springs in the photo above which were also used in the IEDs, but the results were devastating against Canadian and coalition troops.