Weird CNN headline: Homemade Iraq bombs kill 7 U.S. troops

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Two other U.S. soldiers assigned to Multi-National Division-Baghdad were killed and three others were wounded when their unit was hit by a roadside bomb and small arms fire in eastern Baghdad early Saturday, the military said.

In the past month, the unit has been looking for cells that build homemade bombs.



Homemade? Aren't they all uh homemade?

Maybe they are doing a trial of changing terms? OR maybe they mean as opposed to the ones brought in from, say, Iran?

Despite the fact "bomb" contains more letters than IED, it takes longer to pronounce IED.

In any given news report the reader would intrinsically know what a bomb was. Additional modifiers like improvised or roadside could be used if a news story required it, while IED by necessity requires a definitional footnote.

Makes everyone ask "what is an IED" and the responder

What difference does it make if it comes from a US weapons manufacturer (which have produced exponentially more landmines than any other source) or an Iraqi machine shop?

Perhaps to make them sound like crude, barbarian, last-throe-type devices , unlike the more sophisticated claymore mines and anti-tank mines produced in the USA.

IMPROVISED........explosive device.......the munitions used and the chemicals used were not designed to be used the way they are being used, they are improvised upon to carry out a task that they were not made for........

IOW, the old "can't know who the enemy is, so we have to kill them all" implicit acknowledgment that it's getting worse, not better.

It implies that the average Iraqi is making them now-- which in reality, they've been making them for the last couple of years.

are the enemy and that the "collateral damage" of dead Iraqis is what they deserve. Afterall, "they're just Iraqis" as one military person said at Abu Ghraib.

they are recovered munitions put to work as bombs....These bombs from the story are from homemade chemicals and stuff lying around houses in Iraq. This is due to the increasing shortage of munitions that insurgents are running into. A friend of mine in Iraq was telling me that a 155mm shell used to go for 10 US dollars on the Iraqi weapons market, that was 2004. Last year it was 75 dollars, 2 weeks ago it was 475 dollars......The sources of easy acquired components are ending and we are going to start seeing a lot more bombs like these homemade ones made with chemicals and scrap iron found around the house. So it is a good news bad news story, homemade bombs will be less effective than prebuilt munition bombs due to liquid propellant versus solid explosive propellant, but there will be more of them, so thus more IED route clearance patrols, more actual bombs going off etc, etc...........

ALL CURRENCY NUMBERS ARE IRAQI DINARs CONVERTED INTO US DOLLAR FORMAT

It depends, I suppose, on your definition of "homemade." Some of the roadside bombs in Iraq are old mortar and artillery shells, left over from the Iraqi army, which are either already pressure-triggered or are wired to be remotely exploded. You could call those "homemade" in the sense that many of them have to be modified in order to function.

Second, you could have some bombs which are completely "homemade," with some guy setting up a chemistry shop in a garage or abandoned building. You can make several types of explosives with reasonably common chemicals, including plastic explosives.

In any event, either of these could be called "homemade" bombs compared, say, to actual landmines or professionally-built anti-vehicle charges imported from elsewhere.

Not all of the so called roadside bombs are homemade. Many are manufactured munitions brought in from outside Iraq and Afghanistan.

munitions that weren't guarded and were looted in the opening phase of this disastrous war, because we didn't have enough troops on the ground and the most important matter was guarding the oil and the oil ministry.

however according to prices on the Iraqi weapons black market those looted munitions are about gone.........More and More IED's are being made if liquid chemical propellants and scrap metal, indicating a dearth of conventional munitions.

Taken with the Iraqi black market prices there is definitely more of a HOMEMADE element going into a majority of IED's...........