How ISIS Produced Its Cruel Arsenal on an Industrial Scale
Mr. McInally said the group also standardized other items: supplemental charges for mortar rounds to extend their range; a common fuze with a spring-loaded striker assembly machined from an over-the-counter bolt;
and an improvised bomb — he said de-miners refer to it as a land mine — that was fielded in a standard-sized plastic tub.
But by the time the Islamic State was defeated in Mosul, he said, it had improved the design
and salted the battlefield and villages with weapons "that last a long, long time." The Islamic State has also engaged in organized scavenging, including collecting dud American-made bombs dropped by coalition warplanes and repurposing their explosive power.
Mr. Barajas said the explosive charges themselves were further standardized — via a so-called
homemade explosive with a recipe the group tweaked and produced at an industrial scale.
Humanitarian de-miners, former military explosive ordnance disposal technicians and arms analysts working in areas captured from the Islamic State provided The New York Times with dozens of reports and scores of photographs and drawings detailing weapons
that the militant organization has developed since 2014, when it established a self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
As de-miners have found weapons, he said, they have routinely encountered improvised devices with a modular design
that allowed for the Islamic State’s fighters to choose from uniform parts and assemble devices quickly.
But the Islamic State took the practice to new levels, with outputs "unlike anything we’ve ever seen" from
a nonstate force, said Solomon H. Black, a State Department official who tracks and analyzes weapons.
