Obama said in a speech on Sunday, “The strategy that we are using now – airstrikes, (U.S.) Special Forces and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country – that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory”. “And it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil”.
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The report says that “endemic corruption” in the Iraqi military contributed to these weapons reaching the hands of extremist militants long before the formation of ISIS, which was formerly Al Qaeda in Iraq but defected from Al Qaeda’s global network in early 2014.
The report also found that these arms flows were funded variously by oil barter arrangements, Pentagon contracts and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation donations.
US support for ISIS began as support for jihadists fighting against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “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 U.K. have ended up inadvertently arming ISIS should give us pause over current weapons deals, ” said Amnesty U.K.’s arms programme director Oliver Sprague.
That stockpile, according to Amnesty International, includes “more than 100 different types of arms and ammunition”, including hundreds of thousands of US-manufactured assault rifles and pistols that were supplied to the Iraqi army between 2003 and 2007, during the US-led occupation.
Among the more advanced weaponry ISIS have access to are the man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS), armoured vehicles, and guided anti-tank missiles.
ISIL, which seized large swaths of Syria and Iraq in recent years, has obtained a significant portion of its weapons from capturing key military bases in both countries. Deliveries had been ongoing as part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s $1.6 billion budget.
READ: Will any of Obama’s ISIS proposals succeed? The group also sequestered weapons from the battlefield, from illicit trade and from defections of fighters in Iraq and Syria.
The West, Gulf countries [the Islamic regimes ruling Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc.], and Turkey support the Syrian opposition.
The huge supply of weaponry has enabled ISIS to carry out its abominable abuses of human rights and violations of global humanitarian law, resulting in a mass exodus of people and forcing them to become refugees.
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In order to avoid further proliferation to armed groups in the region and the misuse of these weapons by groups like ISIS, Amnesty International is calling for supplier states, including the US, to work with Iraqi authorities to quickly implement stricter controls on the transfer, storage and deployment of arms.
