Inadvertently arming Daesh

One of the earliest major setbacks in the war against Daesh came last June when the US-backed Iraqi army was routed by the militants in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Government forces retreated from the militants’ assault. They left behind a trove of costly military hardware, including US-made armored Humvees, trucks, rockets, machine guns and even a helicopter.
Last weekend, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, gave Iraqi state television the first detailed accounting of those lost weapons. Some were old or barely functioning, but others were in good shape and of great value to the Daesh militants.
According to Reuters, the US-made weaponry that fell into enemy hands included 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition.
Although Al-Abadi and other Iraqi and US officials haven’t attached a dollar sign to the lost weaponry and vehicles, the grand total comes to $656.4 million, but experts say those losses represent just a portion of the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of US-supplied military equipment that has fallen into Daesh’s hands and is being used against the US and allied forces on the ground in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Daesh added to its armada of captured US military vehicles and tanks when Iraqi forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi late last month and left behind their equipment, according to Military.com. A Pentagon spokesman said that some artillery pieces had been left behind, but he could not say exactly how many. He said about 100 wheeled vehicles and dozens of tracked vehicles were lost to Daesh when the last remaining Iraqi defenders abandoned the city, which is 60 miles west of Baghdad.
With hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from banks and businesses, and profits from the black-market sale of oil, Daesh has amassed a huge arsenal of weaponry, including heavy armored vehicles and artillery during its two-year offensive in Syria and Iraq. According to the International Business Times, the armaments “are predominantly a mix of veteran Soviet tanks, large, advanced US-made systems, and black-market arms.”
Add to that the many hundreds of US-manufactured weapons and vehicles left behind by Iraqi troops on the battlefield, and Daesh apparently doesn’t have to worry about running short on weapons and ammunition.
Gordon Adams, a military expert at American University, said that while gauging the extent of military equipment losses to Daesh is a risky game, “there is a fair amount of evidence that Daesh is walking off with not only tons of our equipment but a fair amount of the Syrian government’s equipment as well.”
Whatever the numbers, Adams added, it’s an unusual and troubling phenomenon that “we’re helping to arm our enemy.”
Others offer varying guestimates of the extent of the losses of US-made military equipment and weapons to Daesh. “If you say they have captured the equivalent of at least three to four (Iraqi Army) divisions’ worth of equipment, much of it American-supplied, you would be very safe,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While President Obama has vowed to “degrade and eventually destroy” Daesh, recent setbacks in Ramadi and elsewhere have signaled that the war is not going well for the US and its allies. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently publicly berated Iraqi troops for lacking the “will to fight” Daesh and for retreating from a showdown in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. CIA Director John Brennan offered at best a perfunctory defense of the president’s airstrike strategy on CBS’ Face the Nation.
In order to help replenish Iraq’s depleted military arms and equipment, the US State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers, according to Peter Van Buren of Reuters. The US previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers to Iraq, as well as huge amounts of material left behind when American combat forces departed Iraq in 2011.
Moreover, the US is shipping to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 55,000 rounds of tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets, according to Reuters.
Michael Knights, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an authority on the Iraq war, cautioned that too much is being made of the loss of US-made military equipment to Daesh. “A lot of that equipment was not operational when it was lost,” he said in an interview. “A lot of it was burned by Daesh. A lot of it has been subsequently destroyed by the coalition, and a lot of it has been used as suicide vehicles by Daesh.”
“This is a no-kidding war,” Knights said, “and in serious wars you lose thousands of vehicles and you lose hundreds of artillery pieces, and the enemy captures it and use it against you.”
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TRANSCEND Media Service