"Earlier this month, EU authorities tightened restrictions on chemical sales in what they said was a bid to stop the returning ISIS jihadists from targeting Europeans with homemade explosives. The proposals, which have still to be signed off by the EU Parliament’s plenary, will place additional restrictions on the public’s ability to buy substances such as chemical fertilizers which can be used to make explosives, and require businesses to alert authorities to 'suspicious transactions.' 'The guys coming from Syria and Iraq very likely have built hundreds of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in their time there, because that was one of the preferred methods used as an equalizer against the much-better-equipped Iraqi army,' Counter Extremism Project senior director Hans-Jakob Schindler said. Schindler said that while authorities were 'never going to be able to 100 percent prevent access,' the EU’s move to increase restrictions on the sale of chemicals was “about increasing the hurdles for terrorists to get to the stuff.”