Homemade Explosives Not long after the invasion, insurgents began mixing their own batches of explosives and using them against their American adversaries. At first, these mixtures were referred to simply as U.B.E. – unknown bulk explosive. Later, the term HME, for “homemade explosive,” came into wide use. As an agrarian society, Iraq had a nonstop demand for nitrated fertilizers — urea and ammonium nitrate being the most common. Ground urea, mixed with nitric acid, drained and dried, is a powerful explosive. Some caches held bags of hexamethylenetetranitramine, which when mixed with nitric acids produces a powerful explosive known as RDX. Still others combined ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel oil to create the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used to level the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Fertilizer plants, such as this one at Baiji, produced 500,000 tons of fertilizer per year. When homemade explosives first came into wide use in Iraq, American military officers initially thought it was a sign that the insurgents were running out of conventional or “military-grade,” munitions. That assumption had no basis in fact. What it did signal was that the enemy had realized that bulk explosives were more valuable and, in certain situations, more lethal. Experience showed that a large enough charge could destroy any armor, or at least wreak enough damage to cause casualties inside the targeted vehicle. In Afghanistan, homemade explosives became such a problem for NATO forces that President Hamid Karzai’s government banned ammonium nitrate in 2010.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 18:18:51 +0000
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