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Most bombs in Afghan war 'made from banned fertilizer'
The overwhelming majority of the bombs used to devastating effect by the Taliban in Afghanistan are made from a fertilizer that has been banned by the Kabul government, the defense ministry said Monday.
Ammonium nitrate is the basic ingredient of 80 percent of the crude bombs that are killing record numbers of foreign troops and Afghan civilians each year, the ministry said.
The bombs, known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are cheap and easy to make, and are widely deployed by the insurgents in their war against the government of President Hamid Karzai, now almost nine years old.
General Mohammad Shafi Baheer, deputy director of the ministry's planning department, said that until 2007, IEDs were made from leftover ordnance, littered across the country during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.