“The consequences of reckless arms transfers to Iraq and Syria and their subsequent capture by IS must be a wake-up call to arms exporters around the world”, Wilcken declared. The fact that countries including the United Kingdom have ended up inadvertently arming IS, should give us pause over current weapons deals.
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The entire report from Amnesty International can be found here. “Lax controls over military stockpiles and endemic corruption by successive Iraqi governments have added to the problem”, it said.
U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) joined a group of Senate Republicans on Tuesday in calling on President Barack Obama to pursue additional military options as a means of degrading and destroying ISIS overseas and protecting U.S. citizens from attacks at home.
The senators’ letter said that ISIS is a direct threat to the USA and must be mitigated. “And it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil”. Indeed, they’ve built up a chilling arsenal of weapons including sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs, machine guns, guided anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles and armoured fighting vehicles.
According to the human rights defender, the arsenal used to commit atrocities in Iraq and Syria comes from more than two dozen countries, including the United States and European Union countries.
In response to the report, Pentagon spokesman Maj.
Obama confirmed the enhanced efforts to combat ISIS in his Oval Office address on Sunday night, stating, “In Iraq and Syria, airstrikes are taking out ISIL leaders…” Deliveries had been ongoing as part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s $1.6 billion budget.
“We’re hitting a moment where Russian Federation in particular is working to undermine a lot of the progress we’ve made so far by super empowering President al-Assad and by allowing him to pummel the Syrian opposition to a point where there will not be any viable ground force that can push against ISIS”. Over the past couple of years, as ISIS has murdered and raped its way across the Syrian and Iraqi countryside, it has also succeeded in reenergizing the global jihadi movement, driven by its evil ideology and fueled by its hateful propaganda. Moreover, more than 30 countries have supplied the Iraqi army with weapons over the past decade.
Documenting specific abuses, the human rights group said ISIS’ military campaign has “relentlessly targeted civilians with small arms, artillery fire and huge quantities of improvised explosive devices” across Syria and Iraq.
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“The big takeaway for us is that you have to look historically at this and the long process whereby states often recklessly and irresponsibly send arms to Iraq… often in a very uncoordinated and chaotic manner”, Wilcken said. “Poor regulation and lack of oversight of the vast arms flows into Iraq going back decades have given IS and other armed groups a bonanza of unprecedented access to firepower”.
