Amnesty report: ISIS armed with US weapons

Amnesty International’s 44-page report, released late Monday, found that much of ISIS’ equipment and munitions comes from stockpiles captured from the U.S.-allied Iraqi military and Syrian rebels. “And it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil”.

This new military strategy was designed and supported by 65 countries participating in the U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes in the region.

The ISIS is being armed by the very countries that are vowing to destroy them, a report from the Amnesty International says.

“In addition, [ISIL] has captured more sophisticated equipment, such as guided anti-tank missiles (Russian Kornet and Metis systems, Chinese HJ-8, and European MILAN and HOT missiles), and surface-to-air missiles”.

Amnesty International also highlighted the U.S.’s more recent shipment of weapons to Iraq: “Between 2011 and 2013, the US signed billions of dollars’ worth of contracts for 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, F16 fighter aircraft, 681 Stinger shoulder held units, Hawk anti-aircraft batteries and other equipment”.

“The consequences of reckless arms transfer to Iraq and Syria and their subsequent capture by ISIL must be a wake-up call to arms exporters around the world”, Patrick Wilcken, the report’s author told CNN on Wednesday.

Since then, the terrorist organization has continued to capture US-manufactured weapons previously owned by the Iraqi military.

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. In some respects, this was similar to the USA invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, producing a power vacuum that ISIS would eventually fill across large areas of the country – virtually most of the country northwest of Baghdad to the Syrian border.

In response to the report, Pentagon spokesman Maj.

READ: Will any of Obama’s ISIS proposals succeed? A lot of the arms from that period have gone missing: “The bulk have been seized from or leaked out of Iraqi military stocks”, according to Amnesty.

It also said any country that wants to export weapons needs to invest in pre- and post-delivery controls, as well as training and monitoring after the sales.

The huge supply of weaponry has enabled ISIS to carry out its abominable abuses of human rights and violations of worldwide humanitarian law, resulting in a mass exodus of people and forcing them to become refugees.