Ammunition rigged for an IED discovered by Iraqi police in Baghdad in November 2005.
ISIS has taken the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to a nearly industrial level as the terror group continues to hold onto territory in Iraq and Syria, Foreign Affairs reports.
The terror group, which holds large swathes of territory in both Iraq and Syria despite being pressured from nearly all sides, has turned to the use of IEDs as a major force multiplier.
An investigator for Conflict Armament Research (CAR) told Foreign Affairs that ISIS' use of IEDs has reached a "quasi-industrial scale."
"It's unprecedented. We have never seen this before—it's in the thousands and thousands. It's not just a few roadside bombs. There are literally fields of them," the CAR researcher told Foreign Affairs.
CAR's analysis has been confirmed by the US Department of Defense's Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA). A spokesman from that organization told Foreign Affairs that ISIS has totally changed the nature of the threat from IEDs in Iraq.
"Previously in Iraq, we would go after the lone bomb-maker using captured biometrics off an IED and try to link events together from that," the JIDA spokesman told Foreign Affairs. "But now, we face IED factories on an industrial scale, with significant supply chains and funding lines."
Screen grab of a US-led coalition airstrike in Syria.
JIDA notes that this huge ramping up of the construction of IEDs has caused Iraq to become the single most affected country by IED attacks in the world. According to the organization, 11,500 IED explosions caused upward of 35,000 casualties in 2015 alone.
And this upsurge in IED-related casualties linked to ISIS comes even as the US-led anti-ISIS coalition continues to hammer away at the group with airstrikes. Coalition airstrikes in the past have targeted multiple ISIS car-bomb and IED factories.
However, due to the large amount of territory and civilian areas that ISIS holds, the group is still managing to find hidden locations to continue constructing its most devastating weapon.