More than 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols distributed to Iraqi forces by the US are missing, feared fallen into the hands of insurgents, a congressional watchdog warned today.

The highest previous estimate of missing weapons was 14,000, but a new report from the government accountability office (GAO) said US military officials did not know what had happened to 30% of the weapons the US had given to Iraqi forces since 2004.

"They really have no idea where they are," Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information, told the Washington Post, which reported the GAO's findings. "It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors."

The US has spent $19.2bn (£9.4bn) trying to develop Iraqi security forces since 2003, including at least $2.8bn on buying and delivering equipment, according to the GAO. However, the watchdog said, weapons distribution was rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly in 2004 and 2005. During that period, security training was led by General David Petraeus, now the top US commander in Iraq.

A senior Pentagon official told the paper some of the weapons were probably being used against US forces, pointing to the Iraqi brigade created at Falluja, which quickly disintegrated in September 2004 and turned its weapons against the Americans.

The GAO reached the estimate of 190,000 missing weapons -110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols - by comparing the records of the Multi-National Security Transition Command for Iraq against records Gen Petraeus maintained of the arms and equipment he had ordered. Gen Petraeus's figures were compared with classified data and other records. In all cases the gaps were enormous, the Washington Post reported.

During the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s, the US provided about $100m of equipment to the Bosnian Federation Army. The GAO found no problems in accounting for those weapons.

Although the state department usually operates security assistance programmes, the Pentagon is managing the equipment programme for Iraqi forces.

The defence department said this allowed for more flexibility. But as of last month it was unable to tell the GAO which accountability procedures, if any, applied to arms distributed to Iraqi forces, the report found.

Much of the equipment provided to Iraqi troops, including the AK-47s, comes from former Soviet countries.

190,000 US weapons feared missing in Iraq | Iraq | Guardian Unlimited

Oh well. At least losing all those AK-47s builds a market


George Bush is a true glass-half-full kind of guy. He won't let a mere 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq break his stride

Marina Hyde
Saturday August 11, 2007
The Guardian

At times it seems that no statistic to emerge from Iraq cannot be looked at in a glass-half-full kind of way. Last year, when the civilian death toll was having one of its moments in the spotlight, Iowan Republican Senator Steve King claimed: "My wife's at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington DC than an average civilian in Iraq." He explained that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Washington in 2003 and 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole. As it turned out, the source of his Iraq statistic was unclear, while his Washington figures were out of date ... but let's not dignify him any further.

The vignette merely illustrates that no matter how obviously dire a situation, there is usually some idiot on hand, someone who is bewilderingly able to "put a new perspective" on horrifyingly high civilian death tolls, or suggest that one can't make a big democracy omelette without breaking a few hundred thousand eggs (I paraphrase slightly).

Yet occasionally a statistic comes along that seems indefensibly absurd. And so it was with this week's news that the United States has lost 190,000 weapons issued to the Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion - a statistic on which Mr King has unsurprisingly yet to break his silence.

According to the US government accountability department - I know! the what? - 135,000 pieces of body armour are also missing, and even the most frothingly diehard supporters of the whole Iraq adventure are being forced to concede that the figures "raise questions".

Quite. Like: is there a decimal point missing in those figures - perhaps about three numbers in? Did we get tired of asymmetric warfare, so we're now trying to level the playing field a little for these people? Can we at least please stop cursing Iran for supplying insurgents with weapons when we do such a bang-up job of it ourselves? Is the coalition more or less proud than on the occasion when it failed to secure 380 tonnes of explosives after it had captured the al-Qaida installation in which the cache was housed? And finally, is the point at which we can't even locate our own weapons of destruction in Iraq the point at which even the Bush administration has to accept things are pretty much terminally screwed for its mission over there?

Alas, we do not have the answers, because a Pentagon spokesman explains that the multinational force in Iraq is still preparing a response. And really, which of us wouldn't need a bit of time on that one? As yet the administration will only go so far as to concede that "some" of the weapons will have "fallen into" the hands of insurgents - such a peculiarly woolly styling that you'd think they were attempting to suggest that the vast majority of these AK-47s and pistols were adopted by kindly Iraqi families and are now living peaceable existences on country farms, where they scare hot-weather crows and shoot tin cans off rustic fences.

What we do know is that 20% of US troop casualties have been caused by small-arms attacks, and while we will never be sure how many of their assailants were toting Pentagon hardware, the whole affair is starting to make those traditional gripes about how the CIA historically armed the Taliban look like a comparatively astute way of doing business.

Indeed in recent months plenty of commentators have seen fit to point out that Washington is now backing all manner of conflicting factions in Iraq, from supporting a Shia government in Baghdad to backing Sunni Arab militias in Anbar province in their continuing battles with al-Qaida. The unavoidable conclusion, that the US has effectively armed a proportion of the insurgents too, just looks that little bit hard to sell to an already short-fused public.

As the New York Times said this week, $19bn has been spent building and training security forces in Iraq, yet a White House document published last month reported that just six of these battalions are capable of operating without US support, which is four fewer that were able to do so in March. You have to think that even that fabled glass-half-full syntax mangler George Bush is going to have trouble spinning this one. We're not even making progress in not accelerating our regress ...

Still, no doubt he'll pull something out of the bag. I see yet another of those speeches in which the president feigns surprise and frustration at the media's failure to report the good news coming out of Iraq. I see him grinning: "I welcome the Iraqis' eagerness to embrace a market economy." A black market, admittedly, on which the main commodity traded is stolen US weaponry, but it's a truly significant step. Or perhaps he could couch it in different terms. "I look at Iraq and I see strong growth in key sectors." The weaponry transaction sector, sure - but really, we can all see a definite spike here.

Failing that, perhaps Senator King could be persuaded back into the limelight to declare that his wife is far more likely to be ambushed with a US government-supplied AK-47 in Washington than she is in Baghdad. After all, who's counting?

marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk


Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Marina Hyde: Oh well. At least losing all those AK-47s builds a market

Anti-Mafia police uncover arms-to-Iraq plot


· US kept in dark over 105,000 rifles deal
· Revelation highlights Baghdad weapons chaos

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Tom Kington in Rome
Monday August 13, 2007
The Guardian


US loss of control over the flood of weapons into Iraq was highlighted again yesterday when it emerged that Italian anti-Mafia investigators had uncovered an alleged shipment of 105,000 rifles of which the American high command was unaware.

The Italian team, in an investigation codenamed Operation Parabellum, stopped the £20m sale and have made four arrests.

The consignment appears to have been ordered by the Iraqi interior ministry. The US high command in Baghdad admitted that it had no knowledge of any such order, even though the ministry is supposed to inform the Americans before making any arms purchases.

Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Williams, of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, which is responsible for training the Iraqi security army and policy, said: "Iraqi officials did not make MNSTC-I aware that they were making purchases."

An Iraqi interior ministry official insisted the weapons were mostly for Iraqi police in Anbar province. But, given the close relationship between the Shia-led government and Shia militias and the irregular nature of the arms order, the disclosure prompted suspicion that the eventual destination could have been the militias, or police units close to them.

The aborted shipment comes only a week after a congressional investigation team found that the Pentagon could not account for 190,000 US-supplied weapons that had gone missing in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. It would have been another spectacular lapse to add to a growing list that began immediately after the invasion when the US failed to protect Iraqi army weapons dumps from looting and disbanded the Iraqi army complete with weapons.

The anti-Mafia investigators stumbled on the deal, which had not been authorised by the Italian government, while shadowing a group of suspected Italian drug traffickers. Expecting to find drugs during a covert search of the luggage of a suspect boarding a flight to Libya early last year, police instead found helmets, bullet-proof vests and a weapons catalogue.

Subsequent telephone and email interceptions led investigators to a group of Italian businessmen, including Massimo Bettinotti, 39, who were arrested and face arms trafficking indictments in relation to Libya and Iraq. In November, an Iraqi-owned company emailed Mr Bettinotti, the owner of the Malta-based MIR Ltd, requesting 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 10,000 machine guns for the Iraqi interior ministry, stating that "this deal is approved by America and Iraq". The Iraqi company denies any wrongdoing.

By December, the Italians had allegedly found a Bulgarian supplier for 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of the AK-47 and 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same rifle with folding stock, as well as 5,000 PKM machine guns. Before the weapons were supplied, police made arrests across Italy on February 12, including Mr Bettinotti, Gianluca Squarzolo, 39, the man whose luggage had allegedly yielded the original clue, Ermete Moretti, 55, and Serafino Rossi, 64. Details of the deal were uncovered by Associated Press reporters who saw the emails and court documents.

The Iraqi interior ministry refused to discuss the case publicly but a ministry official, speaking off the record, confirmed that the ministry had sought the weapons. Asked about the irregular channels used, he said the ministry "doesn't ask the supplier how these weapons are obtained".

Why the police in Anbar would need more weapons raises further questions. The Pentagon has issued 169,280 AK-47s, 167,789 pistols and 16,398 machine guns to the 161,000 police throughout Iraq and 28,000 border police.

In a separate development, the costs of the US operation are continuing to soar. The Washington Post reported yesterday that the US military had paid $548m (£274m) to two British security firms to protect the US Army Corps of Engineers, mainly civilians carrying out reconstruction work, more than $200m over the original budget.

The two companies, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, signed their contracts in 2004. In July, the security force in Iraq had grown to 2,000 employees.

The deal was attributed by the Pentagon to the growth in the insurgency. The Pentagon estimates that there are 20,000 private security contractors in Iraq. Colonel Douglas Gorgoni, senior finance officer for the Corps of Engineers in Iraq, said: "To pay a man or a woman to come over here, put the vest on every day and escort military and civilians around the theatre, knowing that people want to blow them up and kill them, you gotta pay to get that level of dedication."

Backstory

The number of illegal weapons in Iraq is unknown but the country has been awash with them since at least 2003. The then highest-ranking US official in Iraq, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi army, sending thousands of men away with weapons. That decision, which led to many of them joining the insurgency, was compounded by a failure of US troops to protect Iraqi arms dumps, which were looted. Weapons have also been smuggled over the border. The US and Britain claim Iran has been supplying weapons, including sophisticated roadside bombs, though Tehran has complained about the destabilising impact that all the weapons are having on its country.

Anti-Mafia police uncover arms-to-Iraq plot | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited