Daesh arsenal made up of USA weapons

A new report by Amnesty International details how weapons from countries including the US have ended up in the hands of Islamic State fighters, who have used them to commit “serious human rights abuses and [violate] international humanitarian law”.

“This shows that risk assessment and measures to reduce arms exports towards volatile parts of the world will result from a long-term and comprehensive analysis of the situation”, suggests Patrick Wilcken, in charge of investigations into arms control.

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.

“While precise chains of custody are hard to establish, a substantial proportion of IS’ current military arsenal comprises weapons and equipment captured or illicitly traded from poorly secured Iraqi, and, to a lesser extent Syrian, military stocks”.

The Amnesty report states that arms and ammunition used by ISIS have been traced to at least 25 different countries.

“Iraq has become an emblematic case of the grave dangers of arms accumulation and proliferation and the irresponsible trade in weapons and munitions”, Amnesty International said in a summary of the report “Taking Stock: the Arming of Islamic State”. For example, upon capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, the group commandeered more than 2,300 US armored vehicles from the fleeing Iraqis, according to The Guardian.

Washington-Terrorism has evolved since the events on September 11 into a less complex form of killing innocents, US President Barack Obama said on Sunday night in an address to the American people, warning that successful lone-wolf attacks could tear at the country’s historic commitment to tolerance and equality.

Despite last week’s horrific San Bernadino shootings, the stakes at home for Russian President Vladimir Putin are much higher than they are for President Obama, and the prospects for Moscow eventually getting more deeply involved in the ground war fighting are therefore much greater.

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq is specifically criticized in the report.

In a video published on Facebook, coalition headquarters said Daesh is a derogatory version of the group’s Arabic name: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. To protect the United States, the president urged Congress to ban assault weapons and restrict anyone on a no-fly list from buying a gun.

“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 further explained.

“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.

“According to Amnesty, “[ISIL] fighters are now equipped with large stocks of mainly AK variant rifles, but also USA military-issued M16, Chinese CQ, German Heckler & Koch G3 and Belgian FN Herstal FAL type rifles. Those weapons weren’t properly audited by the US-led coalition forces and hundreds of thousands went missing.