The Daily Background

According to a new audit, thousands American-paid for weapons meant to supply Iraqi security forces have mysteriously disappeared. Associated Press reports:

A second report found “significant challenges remain that put at risk” the U.S. military’s goal of strengthening Iraqi security forces by transferring all logistics operations to the defense ministry by the end of 2007.

The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons — almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to
Iraq since the end of 2003, according to a report from the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided — less than 3 percent.

The number of weapons missing (more than ten thousand pistols, hundreds of assault rifles and about one hundred fully automatic heavy machine guns) is equivalent to one out of every twenty five meant to be for Iraqi security. Further, another related audit has found that “there is a “significant risk” that the Iraqi interior ministry “will not be capable of assuming and sustaining logistics support for the Iraqi local and national police forces in the near term.”

These weapons may have joined the myriad of weapons floating around on the black markets of Baghdad, along with the hundreds of thousands of weapons that Saddam’s old Iraqi army were allowed to keep once they disbanded (a truly boneheaded decision on the part of the Pentagon when they allowed that).

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog