How ISIS Got Its Weapons

Daesh, which controls about a third of Syria and as much of Iraq, has been mainly fighting with weapons looted from the Iraqi military that were manufactured and designed in more than two dozen countries, including Russia, China the U.S. and European Union states, the report said.

The report, titled “Taking Stock: The Arming of Islamic State”, released by the human rights organisation on Monday, was based on the expert analysis of thousands of images of the extremist group, which has proclaimed a caliphate in the conflict-ridden region.

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) managed to acquire most of its munitions by raiding weapons depots of the Iraqi government army.

“We’re hitting a moment where Russian Federation in particular is working to undermine a lot of the progress we’ve made so far by super empowering President al-Assad and by allowing him to pummel the Syrian opposition to a point where there will not be any viable ground force that can push against ISIS”.

“From 2003 to 2007, the United States of America and other coalition members transferred more than 1 million infantry weapons and pistols with millions of rounds of ammunition to the Iraqi armed forces, despite the fact that the army was poorly structured, corrupt and ill-disciplined”, Amnesty reported.

Amnesty says that in order to effectively curb the proliferation and misuse of arms in Iraq, the worldwide community must adopt and enforce stricter controls on the export of arms to the country.

Documenting specific abuses, the human rights group said ISIS’ military campaign has “relentlessly targeted civilians with small arms, artillery fire and huge quantities of improvised explosive devices” across Syria and Iraq.

This leaves us with many questions regarding where ISIS obtained all of these Western-supplied weapons of war.

This criticism brings the response that the USA doesn’t have good intelligence in Syria and Iraq so it doesn’t know what to bomb. I am sure we can defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but what does it do?

The report points out several instances of ISIS militants seizing large caches of weapons as their territory expanded in Iraq.

The West, Gulf countries [the Islamic regimes ruling Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, etc.], and Turkey support the Syrian opposition.

The human rights group called on all states to adopt a “presumption of denial” rule when it came to sending weapons to Iraq, meaning stringent criteria would have to be in place.

He said ISIS was able to effectively use some of its more sophisticated weapons, specifically anti-tank missiles, to capture the Iraqi cities of Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah past year but has recently resorted to using improvised explosives, rather than conventional weapons, to inflict mass casualties on enemies.

ISIS firing from a captured US Humvee.