Cell Phone Puzzle

I was reading an E-mail from one of our soldiers in Iraq the other day and he mentioned that his unit had caught a man responsible for a roadside IED explosion and that he still had the cell phone used to detonated the device when they caught him. That got me to wondering about how the terrorists go about using cell phones to work well enough to time an explosion to be as effective as our news suggests they are. My cell phone is much too iffy to be used in this way, I think. When we had AT&T service, the phone wouldn't work if you were standing right under a tower. We have a second home on Edisto Beach in South Carolina and our phone works off a cell tower placed on the water tower and our phone won't work if you get past the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. This all suggests to me that Iraq has intermittant electricity, woefully inadequate sewage treatment, and numerous other infrastructure deficits, but they must have one terrific cell phone system to explode IEDs. Why must Iraq have cell phone service at all? I say shut it down all over the country. Surely our military doesn't need cell phones to function. If it does, we are in worse shape than I imagined. When the country is pacified and our troops are no longer under attack, the cell phones can be turned on again. Until then, if even one soldier can be prevented from being killed or wounded, we should make sure cell phones in Iraq don't work.