{"id":48419,"date":"2014-10-13T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48419"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:39","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:39","slug":"investigators-find-islamic-state-used-ammo-made-in-21-countries-including-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/investigators-find-islamic-state-used-ammo-made-in-21-countries-including-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"Investigators Find Islamic State Used Ammo Made in 21 Countries, Including USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new report from an arms tracking group highlights how readily arms shipped to the Middle East are transferred from allied groups to hostile ones.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ammunition<\/a>

Ammunition found in Iraq and Syria. Top, left to right: China, made in 2009; Syria, made in 1960; Russia, made in 2012; US, made in 2006. Bottom, left to right: U.S. casing, made in 2004; Turkey, made in 2013; Sudan, made in 2012; Iran, made in 2006. Conflict Armament Research<\/p><\/div>\n

Correction, Oct. 6, 2014<\/strong><\/em>: An\u00a0earlier version of this story reported that IS fighters used oxy-acetylene torches to obscure serial numbers on weapons. According to the Conflict Armament Research\u00a0report<\/a>, “unidentified parties” removed the original serial numbers.<\/em><\/p>\n

An independent arms monitoring group has collected evidence that fighters in the Middle Eastern extremist group known as the Islamic State, labeled a \u201cnetwork of death\u201d by President Obama, are using weapons and ammunition manufactured in at least 21 different countries, including China, Russia, and the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The group\u2019s report<\/a>, released Oct. 6, indicates that the Islamic State\u2019s relatively newly-formed force has had little difficulty tapping into the huge pool of armaments fueling the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, supplied not only by the world\u2019s big powers but also by up-and-coming exporters such as Sudan.<\/p>\n

Much of the Islamic State arms and ammunition were captured on the battlefield, but intelligence reports have suggested that the group\u2019s\u00a0income from oil sales and other sources is high enough to\u00a0finance\u00a0purchases\u00a0of additional weapons directly from the companies and dealers that routinely profit from strife in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Experts say the fact that the armaments have such disparate sources \u2014 some were even made at a major U.S. munitions plant in Missouri \u2014 provides a cautionary note as Washington prepares to undertake expanded shipments of military supplies, including small arms, to rebel groups in Syria and to a revived Iraqi Army force.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe faced an enormous [monitoring] challenge when we, in effect, owned Iraq and had many bases where we could do this type of training,\u201c said Joseph Christoff, who directed international affairs and trade issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office between 2000 and 2011, when the GAO repeatedly identified shortcomings in controlling the use of U.S. weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how we\u2019re going to do it securely in this new program\u201d\u00a0meant to arm\u00a0Western-allied rebel forces in Syria, Christoff said.<\/p>\n

The new data were collected by a three-year-old, London-based group called Conflict Armament Research<\/a>, which sends investigators into conflict zones to identify the types and origins of weaponry used in the fighting. Its latest report, financed by the European Union, lists the origins of more than 1700 cartridges collected last July and August in northern Iraq and northern Syria by investigators working alongside Kurdish forces that had fought the forces of the Islamic State, generally known as ISIS or ISIL.<\/p>\n

The cartridges they found after four battles were manufactured for machine and submachine guns, rifles and pistols. One Soviet-manufactured cartridge dated from 1945, a grim testament to how the production of such weaponry can impact many generations hence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manufacturers in Russia and the former Soviet Union made a total of 492 of the recovered shells, according to the report. Russia has been a major arms supplier to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, whose forces also have been battling the Islamic State. (article continues below)<\/p>\n

\"is_ammo_syria\"<\/p>\n

\"is_ammo_iraq\"<\/p>\n

Source: Conflict Armament Research data<\/p>\n

The presence of such weapons in ISIS\u2019s hands makes clear that its fighters seized substantial stocks not only from Iraqi troops, but from Syrian troops as well. Another 26 of the recovered shells were made in Iran, an ally of Assad\u2019s, and 18 were made in Syria itself, the report states.<\/p>\n

The next-biggest country of manufacture was China, the origin of 445 of the cartridges recovered from Islamic State forces.<\/p>\n

The third-highest supplier was the United States, with 323, the report said. Some of these shells, meant for M16A4 assault rifles,\u00a0<\/strong>were made at the U.S. Army\u2019s huge\u00a0munitions factory<\/a>\u00a0in Independence, Missouri, the report said. The plant sprawls over nearly 4,000 acres and has recently produced a staggering 4 million rounds of small caliber ammunition every day, mostly for U.S. forces.<\/p>\n

A promotional\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0for the Army factory, uploaded to YouTube in 2009, quotes an unidentified worker there saying, \u201cI feel good because I do the best that I can, because I know that they\u2019re fighting for me, overseas, and no junk comes out of here.\u201d Justine Barati, a spokeswoman for the Army’s joint munitions command, confirmed that the plant\u00a0makes the 5.56-mm ammunition depicted in the report, but said she could not comment further until the report was released publicly.<\/p>\n

According to the monitoring report, the trademarked emblem of a California-based firm, Sporting Supplies International Inc., was found on many shells, which it said were evidently manufactured in Russia for the firm. \u201cSignificant quantities\u201d of the firm\u2019s WOLF brand 7.62 x 54R mm cartridges for machine guns and rifles are used by Islamic State forces, the report states.<\/p>\n

The privately-owned Sporting Supplies firm does not appear to have a public website. But it made at least 14 separate ammunition sales to the Department of Defense between 2007 and 2010, worth more than $5.7 million, according to the Federal Procurement Database System.<\/p>\n

A lawyer for Sporting Supplies, Michael Faucette, did not respond to questions about the company\u2019s ownership or its work for the Pentagon. But he said, \u201cThere are many United States businesses, including wholesalers and manufacturers, that supply ammunition and other products to the U.S. Government. Unfortunately, we are aware that ISIS forces have overrun ammunition and equipment depots in Iraq \u2026 Accordingly, it is entirely possible that those depots contained U.S. provided ammunition that have been repurposed against Iraqi Government forces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faucette added that the company \u201cdoes not own a trademark to the WOLF-brand in Russia. Therefore, if various plants in Russia manufacture and distribute ammunition with WOLF-brand head stamps, it would be without Sporting Supplies International, Inc.’s knowledge or approval.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ten percent of the cartridges documented in the Conflict Armament Research report were produced between 2010 and 2014, according to the report, with Bulgaria and China accounting for more than half of these new items.<\/p>\n

Exemplifying the shifting nature of ownership on a battlefield, the monitoring group reported that many of the Islamic State weapons and armaments it found and examined were later used by Kurdish forces from Iraq and Syria in new fighting.<\/p>\n

When the investigators reached a Kurdish base in northern Syria on July 13, for example, soldiers paused from digging trenches to show off some of their recently captured bullets. \u201cThey laid out the ammo on a blanket in front of us, very politely, but also urgently, like, \u2018We kind of need this back now,\u2019 while we photographed each piece,\u201d said Damien Spleeters, a field investigator with the group. When the documentation was complete, Spleeters said, the fighters put the ammunition in a car and whisked it back to the front line.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0released earlier by the monitoring group identified additional small arms captured by the Kurdish fighters from Islamic State forces, including \u2014 surprisingly \u2014 five M16 rifles. An M16 rifle and other U.S.-manufactured weapons were captured in northern Syria roughly two weeks after Islamic State fighters took control of the Iraqi city of Mosul, demonstrating the group\u2019s \u201clogistical competence,\u201d that report said.<\/p>\n

Ammunition for the M16 rifle is not readily available in Syria, Spleeters said, so \u201cwhen you use that type of weapon in a battle, it means you\u2019re confident that you can sustain a fight consistently over long periods with the ammunition it requires, and that you have a robust supply chain to bring it there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fitful U.S. efforts to track where its weapons go<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Sept. 18, Congress passed a\u00a0law<\/a>\u00a0authorizing the Defense Department not only to re-equip Iraqi forces that lost territory and abandoned their weaponry to ISIS, but also to provide arms to \u201cappropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition.\u201d The law requires the department to develop a plan with the State Department to monitor where the weapons wind up and, eventually, to mitigate their misuse by unauthorized combatants. Lawmakers are supposed to review the monitoring plan two weeks prior to new exports.<\/p>\n

But Deputy Secretary of Defense\u00a0Robert O. Work<\/a>\u00a0told the Center for Public Integrity on Sept. 30 that these measures are still being developed. Joshua M. Paul, a former U.S. embassy officer in Iraq who is now a spokesman for the State Department bureau that oversees weapons exports, said not only that he could he not be quoted speaking about the issue, but that he could not be quoted speaking about any other issue if the Center\u2019s policy is to attribute his comments to him.<\/p>\n

The Islamic State, meanwhile, has said it welcomes fresh opportunities to get its hands on additional Western-supplied munitions.<\/p>\n

“Look how much money America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets,” says Abu Safiyya, the\u00a0jubilant\u00a0narrator\u00a0of an Islamic State propaganda\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0uploaded onto YouTube on June 29. Gesturing at a Ford F-350 truck parked in an Iraqi police base captured by the extremist militants over the summer, Saffiya said, “They will lose in Syria also, inshallah, when they come. We will be waiting for them, inshallah, to take more money from them.”<\/p>\n

U.S. law is supposed to guard against the diversion of arms that the U.S. ships abroad. The Arms Export Control Act has long required that Congress be notified of large exports of small arms and light weapons, and be given a chance to review them in advance.<\/p>\n

Between 2003 and 2013, the senior Senate staff member in charge of that review process was Thomas Moore on the Foreign Relations committee, who said the experience made him wary about what Washington is about to do now. He said the military\u2019s Central Command repeatedly tried to skip the usual foreign military sales procedures and \u201cjust start handing things out to people, with the justification that \u2018we\u2019re at war, so we need to get these things out the door.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Under normal circumstances, he noted, government-to-government sales of defense goods and services \u2014 weapons and training \u2014 are coordinated by the Pentagon\u2019s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. When a weapon is sold or given by the Defense Department to a foreign government, the agency oversees everything from the initial contract with a weapons supplier to the end-use tracking of the weapon.<\/p>\n

The export leaves a paper trail in its wake, which includes a \u201cletter of acceptance\u201d or \u201cLOA\u201d from the foreign recipient authorizing the Defense Department to periodically monitor the weapon and make sure nothing unauthorized has occurred. But in the mid-2000s, Moore said, the agency started to use something it officially called a \u201cpseudo-LOA,\u201d with weaker end-use monitoring requirements, to keep the arms flowing into Iraq quickly.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have limited accountability even when you have an acquiescent government that will let you send in monitors,\u201d Moore said. \u201cBut we are dealing with rebel groups, and the notion that you can have a pseudo-LOA with a rebel group is strange to just plain silly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, Washington spent nearly $30 billion training and equipping Iraqi security forces, and a sizable chunk of the small arms and other weapons systems it handed over is now unaccounted for, in the wake of ISIS\u2019s seizure of the cities of Mosul, Fallujah, and Tikrit, as well as surrounding territory.<\/p>\n

Even at the outset of the U.S. occupation, U.S. commanders on the ground kept sparse records of where U.S.-supplied weapons wound up; a\u00a02007 Government Accountability report<\/a>\u00a0said that 190,000 weapons could not be located then.<\/p>\n

John Holly, a\u00a0retired Marine colonel who served as director of reconstruction logistics for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, said that during this period, he struggled to catalog all Pentagon-funded arms shipments, which arrived in the country in a disorganized state. Some lacked serial numbers or other appropriate data but nonetheless had to be shipped onward immediately to Iraqi defense or security forces.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most fatal Shakespearean flaw was: There was no centralized database of what we had procured for the Iraqis,\u201d Holly said in an interview with the Center. \u201cI was delivering weapons and ammunition to police stations through their backdoors while they were having gunfights out the front door \u2014 and trying to get a receipt from the chief [Iraqi] officer, who was real enthusiastic about it, I can tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, at the end of the Bush administration, monitoring was put into place for the most sensitive gear, but officials\u00a0say it\u00a0did not\u00a0encompass simple weapons like M16s. \u201cYou gotta accept some risk in this,\u201d said retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, who directed the training and equipping of Iraqi police and army security units from 2009 to 2011 and now favors rearming the Iraqis. \u201cIt\u2019s gonna happen. It\u2019s combat. You get tactically defeated, you lose equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stuart Bowen, who served as the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction between 2004 and 2013, warned that even though U.S. monitoring became better during this period, the U.S. forces in Iraq could only keep track of most equipment until it passed into Iraqi hands. End-use monitoring after that point was “the real challenge,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s one thing to say whether we have a serial number tracking system; it’s quite another to say whether the Iraqi army had the capacity to be aware of whether weapons went missing,” Bowen said. “I suspect they did not have that full capacity.”<\/p>\n

Islamic State fighters may have anticipated that the Pentagon will make a renewed effort to track whether its future arms shipments stay in the right hands. According to the Conflict Armament Research group, unidentified parties have been using oxy-acetylene torches to remove the original serial number from some of the weapons captured from IS. On some other weapons, they added a secondary serial number.<\/p>\n

Obscuring the original serial numbers, Spleeters explained, is a way for those involved to hide the point at which the weapon was diverted and who its original intended user was.<\/p>\n

Watch VIDEO:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lake City Army Ammunition Plant<\/a><\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

The Center’s data researcher Alex Cohen contributed to this article.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 publicintegrity.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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