IS swept across Iraq in the summer of 2014, capturing the second largest city, Mosul, and taking weapons left behind by fleeing Iraqi security forces, including U.S.-supplied arms and military vehicles. Since 2005, the USA has approved more than $18.6 billion worth of foreign military sales to Iraq, according to the Department of State.
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An Amnesty International report has detailed how the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group obtained the bulk of their vast arms supply from the Iraqi army.
The stockpile of weaponry being used by Islamic militants to kill, terrorize, and attack hapless civilians worldwide actually came from more than 25 countries including China, Russia, US, and the European Union states, a report released by the Amnesty International said. Unnamed US officials said that the 8-page report predicts that the self-proclaimed Islamic State will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria.
“Poor regulation and lack of oversight of the enormous arms flows into Iraq going back decades have given IS and other armed groups a bonanza of unprecedented access to firepower”, he said.
The Amnesty International report, however, concluded that it was these local forces that had inadvertently contributed arms to IS.
“We also recognize that the threat of ISIS can not be divorced from the overall conflict in Syria, which continues to rage, fueled further by Russian and Iranian interference”, they added.
Amnesty based its report on expert analysis of verified videos and images.
“The 1980s was a crucial era for arms buildup and that was the time of the Iran-Iraq War, when Russian Federation was the principal supplier of Iraq”, Wilcken said.
Ten GOP senators are proposing ideas for stepping up the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Slack controls over Iraqi military stockpiles and endemic corruption by successive Iraqi governments have added to the problem.
Most weapons had been looted from Iraqi army stocks.
He said even if Daesh is uprooted, other armed groups will take their place.
“And a lot of old Warsaw Pact stock has been transferred by the US, the United Kingdom, other coalition members, during the occupation of Iraq and post-2003”. “It’s not at all surprising that there’s been this ease with which the weapons now have spilled over, have been captured, have been leaked, have been smuggled into the hands of a horrific fighting force like Islamic State”, says Neve.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama have occasionally used Daesh.
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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. “The worldwide community must learn from past mistakes and take urgent measures to reduce the proliferation of weapons in Iraq, in Syria, and countries or regions of instability”.
