La Northern Challenge is NATO's most important multinational exercise on the neutralization of improvised explosive devices (C-IED - Counter Improvised Explosive Devices).
The Icelandic 2015 edition was the largest ever, with over 230 operators from eleven countries (Italy, Iceland, France, Holland, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, USA, Canada and Germany).
The theme of the exercise included the presence in the country of a terrorist cell that threatened the safety of the inhabitants through bomb attacks.
The reclamation operations were coordinated by an international command center which managed the daily intervention of the C-IED teams. The Italian staff, three divers of the Diving Operations Group (GOS) of COMSUBIN, evaluated the work of the intervention teams.
Many interventions by NATO bomb squads, not only on land but also at sea in Icelandic waters, which in October have maximum temperatures of 3 ° C.
This edition made it possible to increase the integration between the Weapon Intelligence Service (the information acquisition service on explosive devices) and the intervention teams who acquired the finds of the attack in the field, to have them analyzed in a chemical-physical-biological laboratory of the NATO C-IED center of excellence in Madrid.
